Terminal Island

by Walter Greatshell

  Henry shrinks back in horror and disgust at those eager stumps pawing his face. In frustrated rage and pity, he strikes the man down with the hilt of his stick, knocking him unconscious or dead. The huge man drops as if he was propped up on straws.

  “Shit,” Henry mutters, teeth chattering from adrenaline and damp cold. “Who died and made you God?”

  He wildly swings around for other targets but there is no one. Just him and poor Arbuthnot. Yet he senses some form of attention, like the ghostly eyes of those houses before—perhaps the island itself, its mountains surrounding him like the fingers of two cupped hands. The hills have eyes. Needing to sustain his momentum or collapse, Henry gets a fevered inspiration:

  He picks up the reeking bison head and puts it on.

  It is just a stiff rawhide mask attached to a patchwork robe, with sewn-in bracing to give it girth and a big buffalo hump. The skins are heavy and foul as rotten carpeting. Arbuthnot is also wearing hoof-like steel-toed boots, but Henry doesn’t bother taking those.

  Looking out through the animal’s flaring nostrils, getting the hang of moving in this thing, Henry thinks, Loyal Order of Buffaloes, unite! Then he carefully makes his way down to the fire.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  KODACHROME

  Bones. Human remains, yes; there can be no doubt. It is a killing-field covered with ribs, broken sections of vertebrae, long slender bones with fatty yellow cartilage adhering to the joints, indeterminate bits of hairy offal crawling with beetles and red ants. Chips of smashed skulls, and teeth. Teeth everywhere.

  Emerging into the clearing, Henry surveys the area as best he can with his limited vision, neither shocked nor afraid but simply numb with dull disbelief. The party is over; he seems to be alone. At the edge of the field is a large drink cooler on a car trailer, with cases of toilet paper and empty plastic cups—Henry eagerly fills a cup from the spigot and takes it under the hem of his robe, drinking it in a single long gulp. It is not pure water but some kind of diluted punch, its flavor oddly bittersweet. Spiked with drugs, maybe. But he’s still parched, and a little painkiller would also be helpful right about now. Might as well drink the Kool-Aid, he thinks, slugging back another cupful.

  The fire is almost out, just a heap of guttering embers, but day is breaking, the sky shading from purplish-black to violet to the cracked milky green of celadon. Birds are twittering. Henry sees and hears everything as if from inside a muffled chamber, an iron lung full of stink and the sound of his own breaths, in which he wanders the desert landscape like a marooned astronaut. He regrets not taking the man’s steel-toed boots—on this rocky terrain it is all too easy to stub your toes if you can’t see your feet.

  Finding a freshly-trampled trail through the brush, Henry decides to follow it. It is steep in places and he trips more than once, protected from harm by the heavy suit. Thorns and thistles can’t touch him; he feels armored, and armed—those horns are a deadly weapon. It is tiring, though, and he stops frequently to prop himself against a tree just to take the weight off.

  The trail ends at a second clearing, the center of which is a low, grassy mound like a golf green, with a flat-topped boulder in the middle, flanked by smoldering tiki-torches. The boulder and the grass around it are covered with blood, like coagulating lava. Henry slowly walks up to it, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Yellowjackets hum in the silence.

  Henry feels dizzy and flushed. His head is spinning. Is this what happened to his family, to Ruby and Moxie? To his mother and all those other people? Murdered on this stupid altar, in sacrifice to someone’s idiotic conception of a deity? Even now he can’t wrap his mind around it—it is too insane. This is America! California! Downtown Los Angeles is barely thirty miles away!

  But there it is, right before his eyes, brazenly solid and nearly mundane in its blunt functionality, redolent of routine, large-scale butchery, the sheer chore of it. These people weren’t interested in killing for pleasure; they were rainmaking, operating out of pure faith, acting for a higher purpose. For the love of God.

  No, Henry thinks, crumbling. Please God, no.

  There is a sound of twigs snapping.

  Henry turns around to see a ring of masked women standing at the edge of the grass. Their bodies are naked and filthy white, draped in rubbery garlands of kelp, their hands and feet black with dirt and dried blood. Their bodies are all different, but their hammered-copper masks are the same: the alarming, mutely gaping faces of fish—Garibaldi perch.

  As Henry’s gaze falls on them, the women drop worshipfully to the ground. Crawling on their bellies, face down in the grass, they squirm like monstrous white salamanders to kiss his feet. Abasing themselves before him.

  “Hail Zagreus,” they cry hoarsely. “Zagreus be praised!”

  The mask. I’m Zagreus—holy shit. They start licking his ankles, their hot tongues on his skin. He tries to pull away, but they are gripping him by the feet and he falls backward. Stunned, he feels them pulling his shoes off, frenziedly stripping off his pants and underwear, their hands and mouths crowding under the fur tent of his robe as they work their way up his bare legs.

  Henry doesn’t want to speak and give himself away, but he struggles as best he can to break free. Others surround him, sit on him, grinding their pelvises against the horns and rigid hide of the bison mask, pleasuring themselves and caressing each other as they do so. Soon he can’t move, buried in a crushing tangle of aroused female flesh.

  They smell like the sea, a sultry red tide. His groin is engulfed in lapping wet heat, a nest of urgent mouths sucking him in ten directions at once, drawing out his shriveled organ like a snail from its shell. Against his will, Henry feels himself getting hard, bulging erect under the polishing softness of those lips, inadvertently groaning, “No…no…” and trying to push their greedy heads away, his hands groping under their masks and twining in their hair as they vie for position, fighting for the prize.

  Helplessly succumbing, Henry experiences a strange glow, a heightening and distilling of colors to rich intensity. It seems to come from everywhere at once, a hot, bleaching radiance that renders everything an object of wonder and manic euphoria. At the same time there is a nearly subliminal rising hiss like sand through a chute, the weight of the world dropping away. Overcome for a moment by dizziness, Henry recovers to find that he himself is weightless, freed from all his burdens—did he black out?

  What—where am I?

  It is as if the mask has opened up or become partially transparent, permitting him a vista that is not the brown desert island of Catalina but a shimmering green valley between white-glazed peaks, purple in the shade, with a glacier-fed lake of ethereal blue. Marble statuary is scattered on the grassy slopes in postures of frozen revelry, centaurs and cupids and nymphs, all dancing and holding cups to the sky.

  Motion above catches Henry’s eye: The air is full of angels and winged horses. Flying toward him over the lake’s mirrored waters he sees a V-formation of golf-carts, each one trailing long gossamer strands that seem to be fastened to something below the horizon, laboriously towing it like a team of horses. It is the sun! They are hoisting the sun! As they pass low overhead, Henry can see statuesque beings standing like charioteers in each cart. The leaders are the white bull-man and the mare-woman. The woman is strumming a shovelnose guitarfish, and the minotaur is holding in one hand a golden flagon and gripping the sun’s towline with the other. Following them are various other godly white figures in melodramatic poses. As Henry watches, the bull-man tips his cup and rains down a curtain of iridescent mist upon the landscape. Fields of brilliant white flowers spring into bloom, their trumpet-shaped blossoms emitting a lush, silvery music. Henry recognizes the tune—it is “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” The earthbound statues quiver under the coruscating shower, then slowly creak into motion. They begin to dance amid the flowers.

  I’m dreaming, Henry thinks. This isn’t real. Drugs—I’ve been drugged again. His half-formed thoughts chase each other down a ra
bbit hole before they can be completed, but he knows he is definitely high on something. Like grasping the tail of a whipping kite, he tries to cling to this thought. Not real, not real…

  But it looks so real. The view is awesome, sharper than the most vivid dream, pornographic in its minute clarity. It all has the exaggerated depth and Kodachrome brightness of a 1950s slide of the Alps or the Grand Tetons—the 3D kind that wraps around you like a zoetropic wonderland, untouchably remote and sterile, yet buzzing with manic fluorescence.

  With a sudden sense of foreboding, Henry searches for the darkness he knows is there, the black heart of this world from which all the throbbing secret energies flow.

  There it is. God damn it, there it is. It’s just above and behind him: the bloody altar.

  The stone has transformed into a solid black slab, the only object in sight that does not emit light but instead seems to nullify it, even to suck it in. In its negative density it stands apart from everything else here, and as Henry stares at it he has the nauseating sensation of viewing an optical illusion; something tricking his eyes. Is it a coal-black rock or the dark mouth of a cave? And what is in that cave? The thing defies all attempts to focus on it, won’t resolve one way or the other, and at once Henry is struck with the weird revelation that this is the junction between life and death, between dreams and reality. It is a tunnel not only back to his reality, but to infinite realities. A black hole anchoring this tissue-thin universe like a lead paperweight, and every other universe as well; the one constant joining them all. It strains his eyes—hurts his mind—to look at it.

  Instead he lets his eyes drift upward, losing himself in the immensity of yellow-washed space and the caress of his ghostly seducers. Yes, there they are still; they haven’t gone anywhere but only shifted briefly out of focus. Now their naked bodies are closing in again, blocking his view like translucent and lithely-swaying smoke balloons. Heavenly phantoms.

  That’s the strangest thing: When Henry first saw them, the women seemed repulsive and filthy, the layer of dirt-caked whitewash only highlighting their alarming nudity—most were neither young nor particularly fit. But now they seem to have become graceful, glowing nymphs, their caresses soft as the necks of swans, and he a brutal colossus in their midst, potent enough for all. Lying on his back he feels like part of the landscape, a force of nature, generous and powerful, his penis expanding to volcanic proportions. He is the island, rising from the sea! A microscopic voice inside him cries Stop! but the momentum crushes it and keeps building and building until every fiber of Henry’s body strains to contain it. A drawn-out, stifled cry of agony and bliss emerges from between his clenched teeth: “Eeeeeeeeennnnngggg—”

  “—AAAAAAA! GOD!” Howling into the maelstrom, Henry ejaculates. It is a tremendous orgasm, the most intense he has ever had, but what makes it even more earthshaking is the shared orgiastic shudder of the women, an eruption of mass ecstasy that courses through them all like a shared jolt of electricity, their screaming, arching bodies flattening outward like the rings of a crop circle. Henry has never had anything like this effect on women, and what’s more it is real, not an act but a collective act of will. Religious ecstasy.

  It’s not over. They milk him for every last drop of pleasure, sustaining and goading him to a series of aftershocks, wheedling Henry’s retreating organ to a painful degree until at last he wilts to nothing, wrung completely dry. A calmness descends, the women languorously melting to a stop. All doze.

  Chapter Thirty

  FATHER’S DAY

  Reality returns with a vengeance.

  Oh shit, Henry thinks, awakening to a sordid desert of bones and blood and piss and puke, of naked flesh and the morning sun beating down on his aching bare head. The bison mask is pushed up over his brow and the rest of the costume twisted around him like a vile bedspread. The dregs of the orgy lay all around: sprawled women’s bodies dozing in wallows of their own mess, fitfully swatting at flies. Snores punctuated by retching coughs.

  Gathering what’s left of his frayed wits and fouled clothing, Henry gets dressed and attempts to soberly consider the situation. He is too spent to be truly terrified, but knows that his stint as a God is finished—he won’t long survive the island’s hangover, not by the light of day. Once they find Arbuthnot’s body the game is over. He can’t imagine what fate they reserve for someone who impersonates their deity, but he wants no part of it. Loathing fills the vacuum of his depleted energies—loathing for himself as much as for them.

  “Henry.”

  He whirls around at the voice, the sudden motion causing the contents of his skull to slosh nauseatingly. Shielding his eyes against the sun’s painful glare, he looks up at a pair of sheer-robed female figures standing above him in silhouette. Their skin is painted white, giving them the look of marble statues. Goddesses. One of them steps forward and kneels down.

  “It’s me,” she says, framed in sunlight.

  It is Lisa.

  “And me, honey,” says the other. She is an elderly woman but still beautiful—much too beautiful. An impossible yet familiar face: Henry’s mother, Vicki.

  “Mom…?”

  He recoils in horror, not wanting to know, not wanting to hear what he already knows—that this has all been some kind of terrible charade, a monstrous hoax. Unable to meet his mother’s teary, loving eyes, or even believe in her existence, he pleads, “Don’t—don’t do this to me. Where’s my wife and daughter? Please…”

  In reply, Vicki calls, “Ruby! It’s okay, honey—come on out now.”

  And then the unbelievable happens: Henry sees his wife and daughter emerge from the trees. Ruby is sheepishly holding Moxie with one hand and a shoulder-mounted video rig with the other—exactly the kind of professional-quality camera she always dreamed of, but which he had told her they couldn’t afford. Smiling, she says, “Go, go!” and starts shooting as the toddler runs forward as fast as her little legs can carry her. Henry cries out in joy and relief, rising to one knee just as she leaps into his arms, almost knocking him down.

  “Daddeeeeee!” Moxie squeals with delight.

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” Henry clutches her to him as if to pull her inside his skin. “Baby, where have you been?” he sobs. “Are you all right?”

  “We hided!” She tries to squirm out of his grasp. “Ick, you’re stinky!”

  “Oh my God,” he croaks. “Don’t ever hide from Daddy again. Don’t ever do that. Daddy has been so scared.”

  “Lemme go!” She twists free and goes to wrap herself around Ruby’s leg, saying, “Daddy smells.”

  Looking from his wife to his mother and back again, Henry asks brokenly, “What is this?”

  “Your family, Henry,” Vicki says. “Your whole family.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means everything. It means that we are all your mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters—that we will honor and worship you as you deserve…or it can mean nothing at all. We are sisters of the temple of Zagreus Plutodotes, the Wealth-Giver. You’ve witnessed our secret rite, something no ordinary man can ever do and live—all that is left is for you to accept your sacred birthright.”

  “What fucking birthright?”

  Patiently, lovingly, Vicki says, “You are not an ordinary man, Henry. You were born a prince, a pope—the direct descendant of Zagreus Himself. That makes you God’s representative on this island, the father of us all.” She leans down and twiddles the tiny nibs on his ears. “It’s more than just a myth, my love. The proof is written all over you; it’s in your genes.”

  There is no refuge, no escape for his eyes or his mind. Suddenly Henry realizes in dread and disgust who it was filming that scene of slaughter he witnessed before—the man being pulled apart and devoured alive.

  How could she? Who is she? He stares at his wife, searching her perfect face for something that will help him comprehend any of this, looking for the monstrous other lurking within her. The black halo. But she returns
his gaze, innocent of sin. Somehow she is still Ruby.

  “Is this a movie?” he begs her. “Please tell me this isn’t real, that it’s some kind of crazy stunt of yours. Please.”

  She smiles tenderly, tapping the camera. “Don’t you understand, honey? Video is the language of today. This is a record for future disciples—a digital gospel for a post-literate age! Isn’t that fantastic? Words are so apt to be misinterpreted, misused. Think of all the trouble that’s been caused by people twisting the word of God. With this, no one will ever be confused. Seeing is believing.”

  As if turning away from a stinging hailstorm, Henry faces his mother. Her eyes hold a store of secret knowledge, the sad wisdom of a sea turtle, and she does look different than the damaged woman he’s always known—younger, more robust than he can remember ever seeing her. She looks…sane.

  “Mom,” he croaks, “what do you think you’re doing here? Do you realize I thought you were dead? But even that would have been better than…” He breaks down. “Why—why are you here?”

  “I’m sorry, Henry. For a long time I refused to accept it, too. I don’t know how much you remember, but when you were a child I tried to run away from all this, to ignore it and pretend it wasn’t real. I took you and ran. And they let me—nobody bothered to chase us because nobody ever escapes. How can you escape yourself? We all come home in the end. It was hard…it was so hard. We starved and struggled for years, and I tried any way I could to be like other people, to be normal. But wherever we went, people somehow knew there was something different about us, that we didn’t belong. It might take a while, but eventually they always ended up hating us. Don’t you remember how it was?”