Dead Bait 2

by Steve Alten

  It must be a swimmer, he told himself. Its glistening suggested it was wearing a wet suit rendered pallid by the moon; surely it couldn’t be naked. Was the crouched figure making a joke of his progress? As it began to drag its feet, which struck him as unnecessarily large, along the wall, it looked no more at home on the path than he felt. Its head was bent low, and yet he had the disconcerting impression that it was presenting its face to him. It had shuffled several paces before he was able to grasp that he would rather outdistance it than see it in greater detail. He swung around and faltered just one step in the direction of his car. While his attention had been snared, another figure as squat and pale and dripping had set out for him from the opposite end of the wall.

  He was paralysed by the spectacle of the pair converging effortfully but inexorably on him, the faces on their lowered heads indisputably towards him, until a movement let him peer in desperation at the farthest cottage. The front door had opened, and over the car roof he saw Tom. “Can you come and help me?” Grant shouted, stumbling towards him along the wall.

  The cottages flattened and shrank his voice and sent him Tom’s across the bay. “No need for that.”

  “There is,” Grant pleaded. “That’s in my way.”

  “Rude bugger.”

  Grant had to struggle to understand this meant him. It added itself to the sight of the advancing figure pallid as the underside of a dead fish. The closer it shuffled, the less it appeared to have for a face. “What are they?” he cried.

  “They’re all the moon brings us these days,” Tom said, audibly holding Grant or people like him responsible, and stepped out of the cottage. He was naked, like the figures on the wall. The revelation arrested Grant while Tom plodded to the car. Indeed, he watched Tom unlock it and climb in before this sent him forward. “Stop that,” he yelled. “What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my car.”

  The Cavalier was no more likely to start first time for a naked driver than it ever did for him, he promised himself. Then it spluttered out a mass of fumes and performed a screeching U-turn. “Come back,” Grant screamed. “You can’t do that. You’re polluting your environment.”

  No doubt his protests went unheard over the roaring of the engine. The sound took its time over dwindling once the coastline hid the car. The squat whitish shapes had halted once Grant had begun shouting. He strode at the figure crouched between him and the cottage and, since it didn’t retreat, with as little effect at the other. He was repeating the manoeuvre, feeling like a puppet of his mounting panic, when that was aggravated by a burst of mirth. Fiona had appeared in the cottage doorway and was laughing at him. “Just jump in,” she called across the water.

  He didn’t care how childish his answer sounded if she was capable of saving him. “I can’t swim.”

  “What, a big strong lad like you?” Her heartiness increased as she declared “You can now. You can float, at any rate. Give it a try. We’ll have to feed you up.”

  Beyond the spur of the coastline the sound of the car rose to a harsh note that was terminated by a massive splash. “That’s the end of that,” Fiona called. “You can be one of my big babies instead.”

  Grant’s mind was refusing to encompass the implications of this when Tom came weltering like a half-submerged lump of the moon around the bay. Grant dashed along the sea wall, away from Fiona and Tom. He was almost at the middle section when he saw far too much in the water: not just the way that section could be opened as a gate, but the pallid roundish upturned faces that were clustered alongside. They must be holding their breath to have grown clear at last, their small flat unblinking eyes and, beneath the noseless nostrils, perfectly round mouths gaping in hunger that looked like surprise. As he wavered, terrified to pass above them, he had a final insight that he could have passed on to a classroom of pupils: the creatures must be waiting to open the gate and let in the tide and any fish it carried. “Don’t mind them,” Fiona shouted. “They don’t mind we eat their dead. They even bring them now.”

  An upsurge of the fishy taste worse than nausea made Grant stagger along the wall. The waiting shape crouched forward, displaying the round-mouthed emotionless face altogether too high on its plump skull. Hands as whitish and as fat jerked up from the bay, snatching at Grant’s feet. “That’s the way, show him he’s one of us,” Fiona urged, casting off her clothes as she hurried to the water’s edge.

  She must have been encouraging Grant’s tormentors to introduce him to the water. In a moment fingers caught his ankles and overbalanced him. His frantic instinctive response was to hurl himself away from them, into the open sea. Drowning seemed the most attractive prospect left to him.

  The taste expanded through him, ousting the chill of the water with a sensation he was afraid to name. When he realised it was the experience of floating, he let out a howl that merely cleared his mouth of water. Too many pallid shapes for him to count were heaving themselves over the wall to surround him. He flailed his limbs and then tried holding them still, desperate to find a way of making himself sink. There was none. “Don’t worry,” Fiona shouted as she sloshed across the bay towards him, “you’ll soon get used to our new member of the family,” and, in what felt like the last of his sanity, Grant wondered if she was addressing his captors or Tom.

  A SUMMER ON QUIET ISLAND

  Cody Goodfellow

  From the porch glider on the verandah of the Myrick house, Joe watched the island kids play baseball. Fog thick as cotton wadding rolled overhead, and reached feathery fingers among the trees that defined the dusty field. The scene felt like a silent movie, leeched of all color but sepia and white, the kids hopping and skipping nervously as if captured by a hand-cranked camera—and of course, none of them made a sound.

  The foghorn’s low groan rolled over the island like a broken bell in a church somewhere up above the fog, shaking the brittle, warped bay window behind him, but nobody else seemed to notice. All of them but Joe had been born here, and were probably used to it by now. And most of them were deaf from birth, so they must like it loud enough to make their china dance.

  Mom taught him it was wrong to stare, but what else could you do? Watching the island kids play wasn’t even funny anymore. At home, when a kid had a clubfoot or a raspberry birthmark, you could get a good laugh off him. But here, there was something wrong with everyone. They walked like they had glass in their pants. They stared into space sometimes, like they were sleeping on their feet. And sometimes, they pointed at him on the porch and their mouths opened and a husky, glottal croak came out, like a deaf mute’s idea of laughter.

  Quiet Island took some getting used to.

  Aunt Meg whisked out onto the porch and set a mug of hot cocoa beside him. She ruffled his hair and clucked contentedly, as if she didn’t notice how he flinched. He liked Aunt Meg, but even now, it was hard to look at her. He knew the red sores and turbid papules that made a runny ruin of her smile and ran riot over her hands weren’t contagious. But he couldn’t abide the feel of that hand, coarse from housework and ribboned by weird raised scars with cat’s-claw-shaped growths erupting out of them, the inflamed impression of hunger they conveyed, as if they might leap like fire from her skin to his. But she was family; the Myricks were all the family he had.

  When Joe’s Mom went back into rehab, they sent him to stay with his father’s sister’s family on Quiet Island. He didn’t know who tracked them down or made the arrangements. He’d never met anyone from his father’s family. His mother told Joe that his father came from an island and was a fisherman, but he had to leave. He went up to Alaska to work the canneries and was gone for whole seasons of Joe’s life. When Joe was seven, his father didn’t come back from Alaska and Mom didn’t look for him to return. Joe was thirteen and he wanted to believe this was only temporary.

  Quiet Island is a mile long and less than a quarter mile wide at the south end, where a shallow bay shelters the pier and the meager fleet of fishing boats. In the constant fog, the uneven, restless terrai
n seems to shrink down to the rock immediately underfoot. The fog hides the land and carries the sound of the ocean to one’s ear, so every step seems like land’s end.

  A sliver of castaway land thirty miles off the coast, Quiet Island was settled by a loose confederation of pilgrims who forsook the mainland over some long-forgotten grievance. Thaddeus Fleming, the de facto leader of the settlers, cut off all ties with the outside world and embarked on a muted but thorough campaign to erase Quiet Island from all maps at the time. Somehow, the oversight persisted until the U.S. Geological Survey stumbled upon them with their satellites.

  There were thirty houses on the island, including the old Fleming house, which served as the island’s town hall after the last of the Fleming men was lost at sea. Fourteen houses were occupied. The clans that survived tended to huddle together and many of the occupied houses—the ones with lantern lights in the windows and some remnant of paint on the exterior walls—had expanded upwards and outwards with varying degrees of forethought and execution. A half-timber and brick addition on one side of the Myrick house stood tall and true enough to put its clapboard neighbors to shame, while the wing on the other side lacked the insulation of a chicken coop and listed audibly in the wind.

  Joe was there nearly a week before he realized he had seen no animals. No dogs, no cats, no cows, pigs or chickens, though he saw the overgrown remains of corrals and collapsed barns everywhere.

  He stopped once to explore the burned out ruin of a house. The foundation was bearded in berry bushes and weeds, but the stones were still black in their cracks and crevices. Joe climbed the front steps to nowhere and looked down into the surprisingly deep hollow of the cellar. If it was of a piece with the boxy two-story houses everyone else lived in, the house must have been like a tree, as big beneath the ground as above it.

  An old man on a bicycle stopped on the road and glared. He stood straddling the rusty green beach cruiser pointed at Joe, or at the ruin, then howled a long, drawn-out sound like “Nyeeeyeeooofadoowuh.” His other hand, clutched at his throat to feel the ear-splitting scream, had only two fingers on it, and was mottled with horrid scars.

  Joe jumped off the steps and backed away from the cyclist. One of his ears was melted off and the twitching, awkward posture of his raincoated form when he mounted the pedals and sped away spoke of even worse disfigurement underneath.

  When Joe got back, he wrote a note to Grandma Amelia and slid it to her. She looked at it and folded it, went on chopping onions for soup. His cousin Lorna flounced through the room a minute later and glanced at the note. “The Rowbottom house burned down. People said your father did it.”

  “That’s a lie!” It was weird, how nobody here would ever tell him to keep his voice down. Uncle Tab was deaf, Meg was deaf and mute, and he could never tell about Grandma.

  “That’s why he had to leave.”

  Joe could think of a thousand good reasons why someone would want to leave here, but he held his tongue. Nobody ever talked to him about his father.

  “He wanted to marry Winnie Rowbottom, but her father said he wasn’t good enough. He left, and when he came back— ow!“

  Grandma Amelia made a “sorry” gesture and wiped Lorna’s blood off her knife with a dishrag.

  It wasn’t so bad here, really, except for meals, which were the same every day. Steelcut oatmeal for breakfast, tuna sandwiches for lunch and every night, the chowder.

  A pot of it was always simmering on the stove, making the house smell like a dirty aquarium. Chowder, they called it, but it wasn’t like any chowder he’d ever heard of. It was red and thick and loaded with herbs and onions to hide the oily, rancid stock loaded with rubbery, spherical beads that popped between his teeth. It tasted like blood, but nobody else at the table seemed to mind.

  Joe often thought that if only someone knocked over the big black cauldron, they would have to eat something else, but he knew there was nothing but canned tuna and oatmeal in the pantry, nothing in the fridge but tubs of cold chowder stock. The store shelves at the market were mostly empty and everyone paid with food stamps for what little there was. The pretty redheaded girl who ran the store in the afternoons never paid attention, but there was no candy to steal. Domino’s didn’t deliver to Quiet Island.

  Once, he asked if it was fish eggs and blood. Nobody answered, but Aunt Meg cried and left the table. Uncle Tab sent him to bed hungry. He didn’t ask about the chowder after that.

  Grandma Amelia’s hands shook worse than usual as she ladled out the chowder tonight. Her fingers jumped and crabbed up with a will of their own. Her tongue jutted out of her mouth and she dropped the ladle into Joe’s bowl.

  Splattered with chowder, Joe jumped back from his chair and shouted, “What the fuck,” but nobody was watching him.

  Grandma’s hands jerked and shredded an invisible bag that seemed to fall over her face. Aunt Meg held her down and pulled her tongue out of her throat. Lorna picked up the ladle and resumed serving the chowder.

  He could walk the length of the island in less than ten minutes, from the harbor and the general store at the south end to the lighthouse on the rocks at the northern tip, but the broken land offered hollows and meandering canyons, where the ruins of generations of tree houses and forts had collapsed or been engulfed by the pickleweed and blood-red ice plant. He would sneak into them to puff a smoke or a bowl from his tiny stash of weed, and goof on the graffiti kids had etched into the wood with charcoal. It seemed like every generation of kids had evolved their own written language from scratch; some were pictographs a Neanderthal would have sneered at, while others had more symbols than Chinese, and were as complex as they were indecipherable. A few words or names were in plain English, but hardly legible.

  Miss Bly, the mule-faced spinster who kept the school in the Smoody house’s parlor, would have caned them for their atrocious penmanship, to say nothing of the vaguely obscene images of naïve yet inventive acts of sexual congress. The boys were absurdly well-endowed stick and balloon figures, but their partners were fancifully and fully rendered, with voluptuous details and lovingly rendered expressions that only made it more obscene, since they were all fish.

  Other days, he went down to the tidepools, but there wasn’t much to see. The waves gushed over the black basalt and flushed out the seemingly bottomless pits in the rocky bluffs at the foot of the cliffs all around the island. The flitting white shapes in the pools were condoms and bits of bleached plastic shopping bags, and the colorful jewels on the walls were bits of glass. At low tide, the still water in the pools glittered with a rainbow gasoline sheen that was prettier than any fish, anyway.

  It was depressing, but it beat looking out at the ocean. The rolling waves were like moving walls between Joe and everything good in the world. Uncle Tab told him the island was a lone peak on an abyssal plain almost two miles deep, but when he looked out at the sea, it was like a hateful huge living thing, shoving the island farther away from the mainland every day.

  The modest armada of boats drifted at anchor in the still black waters in the crook of the harbor and the men sat or kicked the ground in front of the harbormaster’s shack from before dawn to breakfast and the harbormaster’s horn, breaking up in surly groups to work on other projects or skulk in someone’s barnyard to drink. It was not yet the season, Aunt Meg said when he asked why nobody went out to sea.

  The fishing had dwindled to nothing long before anyone on the island was born, except for the quilting circle and old Ichabod Smoody, the harbormaster. The waters around Quiet Island were dead for fifty miles and outside that they couldn’t compete with the big commercial boats, with their sonar tracking and their nets. They used the old ways and trusted in the sea and the sea still kept its promise to the first settlers. It gave them what they needed and more than most folks on the mainland could expect, but one had to be patient.

  Not that Joe gave two shits for fishing, but all the kids his age, boys and girls worked the boats and huddled in their own clique at the edg
e of the fishermen. When the dark began to dissolve into cold green fire on the eastern horizon, the fishermen gathered and waited as Ichabod settled into his rowboat with a box across his lap and was rowed out beyond the breakwater by his sullen great grandson, a hulking, hunchbacked brute with a harelip that split his nose like a bat’s snout.

  Joe hung out just within earshot of the other teenagers. Lorna seemed to be the hub of the group, but she never introduced him around. The other kids clearly asked about him in whispers or signs, but she shrugged as if she didn’t know him, he wasn’t worth knowing, or he didn’t really exist.

  When Ichabod returned, he hobbled up the pier to the porch of his shack before he ceremoniously signed that the tide was wrong and the catch was not coming. The fishermen expelled a collective grunt and dispersed. The kids idled and smoked a while before breaking up. One day, Joe said, “fuck it,” and went over.

  He tucked the earbuds of his iPod into his breast pocket and edged closer with a wistful smile on his face. “Hi, I’m—”

  A big redheaded boy with a pug’s face wheeled on him and socked him in the eye without any warning, without saying a word, and turned back to finish telling a joke with his hands.

  Joe got up and tried to muster the rage to call him out, but there was no opening in the group and he didn’t feel anger. He just felt shock and fear and a dull ache as his eye closed over and he felt nine years old.