Children of the Island

by Wright, T. M.

  "I can see the desperation all around us, in this city, Elena. It's like rain."

  Passersby might have noted that the couple was dressed perhaps a bit too warmly for the day—he in blue jeans, a bulky, white, pullover sweater and jacket, and she also in blue jeans, white sweater, and jacket—but would have thought it was precious that people in love still occasionally dressed alike.

  Which was the reason he walked here. Because the rain that fell outside the park was heavy and confusing. He was an imperfect creature who had done an imperfect thing. He had allowed his perceptions to grow until he could not control them. And now this place, Central Park, 864 acres of his mother, the Earth, was where he had to stay. While the children moved freely in the city all around him.

  "Those that will die, must die!" he repeated, as if to convince himself. "And there are the others, too." She knew this. "There are the survivors; and they will come to know who they are. This place will be ours once again, Elena." She believed him. "The desperation here is like a sickness, Elena. It will turn inward." She understood; her perceptions were not nearly as strong as his—she did not see the rain, she could not reach out and "touch" the ones he called "the survivors," and know they were there, but she understood.

  The beautiful young couple turned left off West Drive and into an area of the park called the Ramble. A jogger passed them and noted dimly that although the day was warm, and the couple dressed for autumn, they huddled close together, shoulders up slightly, as if the air were brisk, and winter approaching.

  John Marsh fished his wallet from his back pocket, took his driver's license out and handed it through the open truck window to the cop.

  "What's the problem, officer?"

  The cop nodded toward the back of the truck. "Your brake lights aren't working."

  "They were when I left Penn Yann."

  "Penn Yann?" The cop handed the license back. "Where's that?"

  "In the southern tier."

  "Uh-huh. You wanta give me your registration, please." Marsh took it from the wallet and handed it over.

  "I had the whole truck checked, as a matter of fact."

  The cop glanced at the registration and handed it back. "I won't cite you this time, Mr. Marsh, but I want you to go get those brake lights fixed today."

  "Thank you. I will."

  "You got some reason for being in Central Park? You sightseeing or what?"

  Marsh paused only a moment. "That's right, officer—just sightseeing."

  "Okay, then"—he stepped away from the truck—"you go get those brake lights fixed. And"—he added as an afterthought—"enjoy your visit."

  Marsh pulled away. At an intersection fifty yards ahead he turned left, and headed for the Sheep Meadow.

  He reached over and scratched Joe's ears. "We sightseeing, Joe?"

  The dog panted in the heat.

  "He's here, ain't he, Joe?"

  The dog continued panting. Marsh pulled into one of the park's many parking areas. He shut the ignition off. "What's he think, Joe—does he think we can't read or something?" He looked through the windshield at an area of the park called the Great Lawn, a name that fit it well. "He's in this city, Joe. I know he's in this city." He watched a jogger pass by. "Maybe he thinks he can hide here, Joe. Maybe that's what he thinks."

  Joe growled very low in his throat, and Marsh glanced quizzically at him. He saw that the dog was looking out Marsh's window; he followed the dog's gaze. Fifty yards away, the path that the jogger had been on sloped at a casual angle, and curved slightly to the right, where a small, picturesque stone bridge had been built over it. The area beneath the bridge was in shadow, and Marsh could make out, vaguely, the form of a child standing motionless there. "Just some kid, Joe—" Marsh began. And the child was gone.

  Marsh cursed. His head darted from right to left in a frantic and futile search for the child. He leaped from the truck, slammed the door shut—closing Joe inside—and moved as quickly as his old legs would allow to where the path and bridge met.

  He moved slowly to the area beneath the bridge. He stood quietly in the shadow of the bridge for several minutes. Finally he murmured, "God, no!" then turned and started quickly for the truck.

  He stopped at once.

  Heading for him, on the path, about a hundred feet away, were Seth and Elena. Their heads were down slightly, as if they were in secret conversation. He could not see their lips moving.

  Spontaneously, he backed away, realized what he was doing, stopped, and waited.

  The couple turned right suddenly, off the path, and onto the Great Lawn.

  This island is ours, John!

  Marsh felt his mouth fall open dramatically. He watched the couple moving away from him, their pace quickening with each step.

  It has always been ours! We have only to take it back!

  A white hot pain seared through Marsh's head. He put his hands hard to his ears. "My God!" he screamed, "My God, My God!"

  His hands fell away; his jaw slackened again. For a moment he stood motionless and dazed; another jogger, coming toward him as he crumbled to the path, turned around quickly and jogged in the opposite direction.

  BELLEVUE HOSPITAL

  RECORD OF ADMISSION

  NAME Marsh, John HOSPITAL # 087565 UNIT:AIT

  last first

  DATE 10/3 TIME 7:45 p.m.

  I. IDENTIFYING DATA: This 73-year-old single, white male was admitted on an HOC from Surgical Unit 5-1400.

  II. CHIEF COMPLAINT: "There is a 'being' in Manhattan that has powers we don't have. This being looks like us, and acts like us, but he is not one of us. He is a creature of the earth. The earth produced him, and I'm the only one who knows."

  III. HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS: Patient was transferred from Bellevue 5-1400 where he was agitated, exhibiting delusions, and attempting to leave against medical advice. Patient was brought to Bellevue via ambulance after suffering collapse at Central Park resulting in possible brain trauma due to subdural hematoma noticed on left side of head. Patient was sedated en route due to agitation and pain. Admitted to 5-1400 for observation.

  This is the first known psychiatric hospitalization for this patient.

  IV. PAST AND FAMILY HISTORY: Patient was born in 1922 in Elmira, New York. Only child with no surviving relatives. Patient claims there was no mental illness in the family. Patient never married.

  Patient states that he worked until the past few years as an electrical subcontractor and handyman in the NewYork State Finger Lakes region.

  The reason for this patient being in Manhattan at this time is unclear. He claims to have come here following this "being" that only he can see and only he knows about, and further claims to have found this being in Central Park.

  Patient spoke additionally of a dog named "Joe," which he apparently left in a pickup truck at Central Park.

  V. INITIAL MENTAL EXAMINATION: This elderly white male was cooperative during interview and reasonably neat and clean in his appearance. Oriented as to person, place, and time. Memory appears good. Affect is appropriate. Speech is coherent and without flights of ideation though clearly delusional and paranoid.

  Patient is preoccupied with paranoid delusions concerning someone he sawin Central Park, referring to said person as a "being." Claims to have been in pursuit of this being from the Finger Lakes Region to Manhattan over a period of many years.

  VI. INITIAL PHYSICAL IMPRESSION: Patient appears to be his stated age. Well-built, healthy for his age. Subdural hematoma left side of head, some minor bruising on left arm and thigh.

  VII. INITIAL DIAGNOSTIC IMPRESSION: 293.5 Organic Brain Syndrome, Brain trauma.

  VIII. INITIAL TREATMENT PLAN. 1. Admission to SM. 2. CAT Scan and BEG. 3. Start Mellaril 25mg.

  IX. JUSTIFICATION FOR ADMISSION

  1) Diagnosis (at least provisional) of a mental illness and at least one of the following in addition:

  2) Aggressive violent behavior toward self or others.

  3) Incompetence to exten
t, unable to care for self.

  4) Physical condition hazardous to health.

  5) Toxic condition hazardous to health.

  6) Delusions, hallucinations, confusion, or impaired reality testing to the extent the individual is rendered incapable of caring for self or in personal affairs.

  7) Uncontrollable behavior requiring inpatient patient observation for diagnostic treatment or assessment.

  8) Need for more evidence on which to base assessment and diagnosis. A brief Interview does not allow proper determination to be made.

  Submitted,

  Kashmar Nerval

  Referred: Halloway

  Chapter 50

  Riverside Drive, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is an area of nicely kept brownstones, large apartment buildings, and carefully maintained trees and gardens. It parallels the Hudson River for all of its sixty-five-block length.

  The woman walking on West 95th Street on October 4th, at about 2:00 P.M., was new to Manhattan; she had found no job yet, but had enough savings to last her in her small efficiency apartment for at least a couple of months.

  She walked almost jauntily in the bright, early autumn heat, her head moving quickly from side to side because she was very interested in her surroundings. She had been raised in a small Midwestern farming town and still held the smiling, inquisitive optimism about all things which had been instilled in her there.

  She liked the way the brownstones rose up out of the steeply angled, grassy plateaus around her, as if each had risen out of the earth through the sheer force of its own will. She liked, especially, the little gardens that people planted at the tops of some of the brownstones, and on some of the balconies, and her gaze was constantly wandering up the sides of the buildings to those gardens, and lingering there for a moment.

  It lingered an extra moment on what she supposed was a small group of children, standing side by side on a balcony ten floors up one of the brownstones. The early afternoon sunlight was on the children and their lower bodies were obscured by the solid balcony wall. She raised her hand to wave, but hesitated, uncertain of her first impression that the children were watching her. She guessed now that their gaze was on the Hudson River, a hundred yards to her right, and she turned her head to see what they were looking at—a scow on its way to dump its daily load of garbage ten miles out in New York Harbor. She turned her head back and looked at the balcony again. It was empty.

  The stocky, middle-aged man had been the maintenance supervisor at the Wellsley Apartments for twenty-five years. He liked his work—it was secure, the pay was okay, and he could keep pretty much to himself.

  It was 2:15. The young woman from the Midwestern farming town was walking past outside, on the sidewalk, and the maintenance supervisor could see her through the building's front doors.

  He thought, Good looking babe!, smiled nostalgically for his own younger years, and then continued with his work—the rewiring of an EXIT sign over the doors.

  He noted obliquely that the building was unusually calm this afternoon. It was never noisy, of course—most of the people that lived in it liked their privacy, their peace and quiet. Consequently, the owners of the building rarely rented to couples with children. But still, in the afternoons, there was usually the distant, tinny whisper of TVs, the low hum of vacuum cleaners, and occasionally someone took the clackety service elevator into the basement to do laundry.

  The maintenance supervisor stopped working again, to listen. He heard a TV, from several apartments down near the middle of the long, wide corridor that led to the building's rear exit. He heard traffic from outside, on Riverside Drive. He heard a phone ring, distantly, from an apartment on the opposite side of the corridor, he supposed. He heard little else; someone humming from above, near the stairway landing, and, very distantly, like a bee buzzing intermittently from the opposite end of the second floor, someone's small dog yip-yipping frantically. The maintenance supervisor catalogued these sounds mentally and concluded, with pride at his intellectual feat, that silence is not always what it seems, and that complete silence, the total lack of sound, would probably be very disconcerting.

  He heard the man who was humming start down the stairs, and wondered a moment why the man hadn't used the elevator. As he thought this, the man stopped humming abruptly; and a short, quick series of grunts came from the stairway, followed by a monosyllabic belching sound. And then silence.

  The maintenance supervisor leaned slightly to the left on the tall stepladder he was using so he could see the bottom half of the stairway. He called, "Is something wrong up there?" He got no answer. He got down quickly from the stepladder and turned his body around toward the stairway. "I said, is something wrong up there?" And then heard, from the top of the stairway, in his voice, "I said, is something wrong up there?"

  "Jesus!" he breathed.

  "Jesus!" he heard, from farther down the stairway.

  He felt himself backing away from it, toward the front doors; his hand touched the side of the stepladder behind him; he detoured around the ladder. "Listen," he called nervously as he backed toward the doors, "you ain't supposed to be in here unless you got some business in here."

  He heard a woman call, "Who in the Sam Hill are you?" He recognized the voice; it belonged to the tenant in 2F. "Mrs. Petersak?" he yelled, and stopped backing toward the doors. A little quivering smile of relief creased his lips. "What's going on, Mrs. Petersak?" he asked, slowly moving toward the stairway. He got a ludicrous, mental image of old, dowdy Mrs. Petersak indulging herself in impressions or ventriloquism, and it made his smile broaden.

  "What's going on, Mrs. Petersak?" he heard from the stairway. He stopped walking at once. The area just above his upper lip moistened with nervous sweat.

  "Mrs. Petersak?" he called.

  "Jesus!" he heard, and, at the same time, from just above the first voice, "I said, is something wrong up there?"

  He started backing toward the doors again. He found that he was still smiling.

  He called shrilly, "You're scarin' the holy crap right out of me, Mrs. Petersak!" And he saw a pair of small, dark, naked feet and calves appear on the stairway. He stopped again. He thought, It's some damned kid!

  "Mrs. Petersak!" he called. "It's some goddamned kid, begging your pardon!"

  ". . . begging your pardon!" he heard from the stairway. And the creature there took another step down, so its smooth, well-developed thighs and genitals appeared.

  The maintenance supervisor felt righteous anger boil up quickly within him. "Goddamn you!" he shouted. "You get your fucking clothes on—he ran toward the stairway as he shouted—and you get back to your goddamned apartment . . ." He got to the bottom of the stairway. He stopped. His arms and belly and lower lip quivered with fear and confusion. "Who in . . . the hell are you?" he blubbered, and found instantly that he could say no more, that the ten exquisite faces looking down at him were not the faces of children—that was clear; they were faces he had seen in still ponds, and in bright blue skies; they were faces and bodies and brains that the earth had called up from itself. And they were in need of him.

  They swarmed hungrily over him. In fifteen seconds they had reduced him to his vitals. Soon, they had reduced him to his bones. They left them scattered at the bottom of the stairway and, as one, moved to the doors, through them, to Riverside Drive itself.

  The woman walking there had enough time to turn and look wonderingly toward the sound of the doors exploding outward. She thought for a moment that there had indeed been an explosion, because she saw movement, and darkness, and she put her hand to her mouth and murmured a tiny "Oh no!" because she had once seen the explosion of a grain elevator in her Midwestern farming town, and its aftermath had been nightmarish.

  But then the movement and the darkness ended, and she convinced herself that the early autumn heat had somehow caused the glass doors to explode—it happened to cars that were left locked up, she knew—and she was thankful.

  It was with that thankfulne
ss in her mind that she died.

  Transcript of a Special News Bulletin, Channel Three: 6:45

  We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this news bulletin from Gwen McDonald, Channel Three's Roving Eye, reporting on the scene at 1220 Riverside Drive:

  GWEN: Doug, I have just talked to Chief Inspector Dale Simon, N.Y. P. D. Violent Crimes Division, and he has informed me that there are at least fifteen, and possibly as many as twenty-five victims here, in one of the most spectacular and gruesome mass murders in New York City's history. I am standing in front of the Wellsley Apartments, on Riverside Drive near West 95th Street, and as you can see, Doug, it is a scene of almost complete chaos. . .

  DOUG INTERRUPTS: Gwen, Gwen, can you tell us if there are any suspects as of yet—are there any suspects, Gwen?

  GWEN: No, Doug, though according to Chief Inspector Simon, the modus operandi appears to be very much the same as in the murders, two days ago, of two young women on West 150th.

  Hold it, Doug: Doug, this is Chief Inspector Simon. Chief Inspector, I'd like to ask you just one or two more questions if I—

  CHIEF INSPECTOR SIMON INTERRUPTS BRUSQUELY: "No, I'm sorry, please, just stand aside, give us a little room."

  GWEN: Chief Inspector Simon, of the NYPD Violent Crimes Division. Doug, I have been informed also that robbery does not appear to have been a motive here. The victims apparently range in age from eighteen years to seventy, and I have learned that a good many of them were found in or near their apartments—

  DOUG INTERRUPTS: Gwen, is there any indication whatsoever that this is a mob-style, gangland execution? Do you see any of that—