The Island: Two Stories of Terror

by Dan Padavona

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  The Island

  One Autumn in Kane Grove

  Dark Vanishings

  Keep Reading!

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  Published by Dan Padavona

  Visit our website at www.danpadavona.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Dan Padavona

  Photographs and Artwork copyright © 2014 by Dan Padavona

  All Rights Reserved

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  The Island

  The Little Princess exploded at high noon.

  Ben’s eyes searched for his son as he ducked his head underwater to avoid the bits of shrapnel from the yacht raining down around him. His eyes opened to a sea of turquoise, schools of fish darting across the ocean floor like the shadow of migrating birds.

  A million thoughts raced through his mind—sharks, the pull of the tide, ocean depth, his missing son. His eyes centered on a conglomeration of coral, beautiful yet sharp as knives. Coughing out the choking sea, he thrust his head out of the water, kicking his legs and spinning in a circle.

  “Matt!”

  A gray plume rose from the remnants of the yacht, bending over horizontally about a hundred yards off the ocean surface as it caught stronger winds above the water. Are we close enough to St. Kitts for someone to see the smoke? The smell of diesel was on the wind, mixing with sea salt and acrid smoke.

  “Dad! Over here!”

  Ben spun 180-degrees to see Matt swimming in his direction. At sixteen, Matt was already a much stronger swimmer than his father. He glided through the water, closing the distance between them.

  “Slow down, Matt. Look out for reefs.”

  Matt reached Ben, and they held onto each other, bobbing in the water like buoys.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you need to look out for coral. It’s everywhere underneath us.”

  Matt pointed toward a hill of lush greens and black rock jutting out of the sea in front of them and asked, “What island is that?”

  “Don’t know. But we had better get to it quick. Just keep an eye out for coral.”

  The island—no more than a hundred yards long and wide—had the appearance of a humpbacked, slumbering dinosaur. Ben and Matt swam more cautiously toward the island, putting distance between themselves and the burning remains of their sinking yacht. Reaching the shallows, they walked through gentle waves which lowered from chest-deep to thigh-high over several steps.

  As Matt smiled at his father, Ben could see the doubt in his eyes.

  Where are we, and how in the hell are we going to get back to civilization?

  “How far do you think we are from the resort?”

  “Can’t be too far.”

  “We lost track of the shore over an hour ago.”

  Ben didn’t know what he could say that would allay his son’s fear. Truth be told, he had the same concern. They could be ten or fifteen miles from civilization; and once the smoke plume dissipated, there would be no trace of their existence.

  They emerged from the water amid gentle breakers onto a white sand shoreline choked with an overgrowth of palm trees. Something sharp and hard crawled over Ben’s foot, and he jumped. A crab the size of a fist lumbered toward the water.

  “At least we won’t have trouble finding food,” Ben said, watching the crab submerge. “We should stay out of the sun while we figure out what we are going to do.”

  Like a wet sponge, the July air encased the island in smothering humidity. It was no cooler under the shadows of the palms, which reached across the sand like claws, but at least they were out of the sun. Something rustled the leaves overhead, and Matt ducked as a white-tailed hawk plunged out of a palm as though it was an arrow shot from a bow. The hawk whistled over their heads and veered toward the shore where it swooped into the shallows, emerging with a fish wiggling in its talons.

  “Better him than us,” Ben said with a forced laugh.

  Through the palms he could see the crystal waters stretching endlessly toward the horizon. The main islands of the Lesser Antilles couldn’t be more than a dozen miles away but in which direction? Palm fronds rustled like distant laughter, the leaves put into motion by a thickening ocean breeze.

  “How are we going to—”

  “We’ll find a way. I promise.”

  Ben pulled off his shoes and socks, leaving them in the sun to dry. Matt sat down and copied his father.

  Behind them, the palms joined with lush ferns and a sea of green vegetation that rose in humps toward the island center. The terrain surface, charcoal-black and loamy, was visible only in scattered patches where the green did not smother it completely.

  In the movies, Ben thought, the stranded saved themselves by spelling out a distress signal on the shore. He wondered if in the world’s history this methodology had ever worked outside of a Hollywood movie set. Still, he had to try something. He peered up into the rising jungle, its interior shadowed and forbidding. Cold reality began to dawn on him. The day had been ethereal—the idyllic beauty of the crystal seas, the explosion, and now this lunatic Robinson Crusoe scenario. It seemed as though he were walking in a dream, waiting for his wife to shake him awake. Incredibly, he was stranded on an unknown island with Matt, with no idea how to get back to civilization.

  “Let’s gather as much wood and dry brush as we can find,” Ben said. “A lot of the wood might be damp so the sooner we can drag it into the sun to dry, the better.”

  “You think we’re going to be here for a while, don’t you?”

  Athletic, and almost as tall as his father, Matt seemed as though he had become an adult overnight; but now he had a look of anxiety in his eyes that reminded Ben that his son was still a boy.

  “Somebody will find us, Matt. It’s not like we are hundreds of miles from shore. But we need to give ourselves every advantage that we can. That means making a fire, putting out a few distress signals, gathering rainwater, and finding food. If we stay calm, we’ll get out of this. Besides, when we don’t return for supper, your mother will have half the world searching for us.”

  Ben thought about Marie, probably slick with tanning lotion and redolent of coconut oil on the white sand beach of St. Kitts. There would be a band playing, the musical tin of calypso drums filling the air as children splashed in the breakers. They should all be there now—Marie ogling the cabana boy who brought them lunchtime sandwiches but saving her desire for Ben that evening.

  Instead he had taken the yacht too far offshore and lost track of the land when the navigation equipment oddly failed. After an hour of drifting without sight of civilization, eyeing the fuel gauge needle which pointed toward one-third of a tank remaining, he had panicked and plunged the yacht toward the island—the first land he had seen in what seemed an eternity. In his haste he had not seen the rocks ahead of the shallows, and he had rammed the Little Princess into a black mass of boulder just below the ocean surface. The stench of diesel fuel became overwhelming, and as Matt rushed to secure the wheel, Ben heard the wicked crackle of flames from below. Ben had just enough time to pull his son from the wheel and dive into the water before—

  “Is it safe to go in th
ere?” Matt asked, staring into the mass of palms which curled over at their tops like talons. Shadows spilled out toward them, massing at the jungle entry like water pushing against a failing dam.

  “Think of the stories you will be able to tell everyone when you get back home—how you braved the jungle.”

  Matt smiled uneasily and said, “There aren’t any…animals or anything in there, right?”

  “Unless Noah dropped them off on a side trip, I highly doubt it.” But as Ben looked into the gloom, he heard something rustle in the undergrowth—probably just a bird, or the wind—and began to wonder if a tiger, lion, or even a dinosaur might be hunkered down within the darkness.

  “But there could be snakes and stuff, right?”

  “Maybe,” he said, not sure what types of reptiles inhabited the Lesser Antiles. He had seen his fair share of geckos, and those quick darting anoles that carnivals and pet stores always mistakenly labeled as chameleons. But he had no idea if poisonous snakes made their homes here. “Watch where you step, okay? Take it nice and slow.”

  Ben led the way, Matt pressed close to him. Ben could feel the flora close behind him, as though a one-way gate had swung shut. When they had climbed the slope for a few minutes, he noticed that everything looked the same. Ferns with fronds that were almost as long as he was tall, stems as thick as a stout light post. He could feel Matt’s fingers grabbing at the back of his t-shirt, the boy’s feet slipping in the soggy loam.

  There was slim quantity of fallen wood to be had, and much of what they found was unusable. Matt bent to pick up a thick branch, and the punky wood crumbled in his hand like wet sand. The boy jumped back as a thousand insects neither could identify scrambled out of the wood and into the underbrush. Black beetles, almost metallic looking, with bodies as large as a good-sized cockroach. Shelled bugs that rolled into balls, like the pill bugs Ben played with as a kid, but these bugs were bigger than peanut shells. Centipede-like things that scurried as fast as a hornet could fly.

  “That’s odd,” Ben said.

  “What?”

  “Those are the first bugs I have seen. You would think we would have a seen a ton more by now. We’re in the tropics, after all.”

  Then, about fifty feet up the slope among the tree tops, the glint of sun, and something glistening caught Ben’s eye. It was almost imperceptible within the dancing rays of the sun over the jungle canopy. As he stared, the wind caught the palm fronds and sent the glistening threads into motion—a spider’s web that was unlike any he had ever seen before. It canvassed the tops of three palms, stretching over the jungle canopy like a safety net.

  “What do you see?”

  Ben gave a start, his transfixed stare broken by Matt’s voice. “Nothing. Let’s keep moving.”

  As he considered the number of spiders required to weave such a web, Ben shivered despite the stifling warmth, as though the back of his neck was touched by the cold breath of January.

  Widely scattered hardwoods grew amid the army of green. The hardwoods that did survive were smothered by moss and lichen, as though under attack by the jungle. Parasitic plants took root in the bark, growing horizontally until they turned upward into the diffused light under the canopy.

  It was under these trees that they found recently fallen branches that were dry enough for burning. Each gripping several branches under their arms, Ben led the way back down the slope. As they retraced their path through bent ferns, the vile stickiness of the jungle interior clung to their skin like a wet suit. Something indiscernible and disturbing also pressed upon them, as though the jungle might spring to life and consume them.

  When they exited the jungle, sweat pouring off their bodies, Ben felt a strange disquiet as though he had passed through a graveyard. Now the unrelenting sun felt cleansing as the breeze thickened off the water.

  Unlike in the movies, the white sand shore was compressed to no more than ten or fifteen yards before the jungle took over. There was just enough room to lay down a dozen pieces of wood and spell out a miniaturized S-O-S. Ben wondered about the tide. The gentle waves stopped within a few feet of the wood. A slight change in the tide would yank the wood into the sea where it would perish with the smoldering remnants of Little Princess.

  Ben squinted into the sun. Neither of them had a watch, but based on the sun’s position he reasoned that it was almost 2 pm.

  “Let’s see how far we can walk around this island. Maybe we can find something that we can use to build a shelter.”

  “Or maybe we will see land from the other side of the island,” Matt said with renewed optimism in his eyes. Ben nodded in agreement but didn’t expect to see anything except an endless ocean.

  The sand was hot in the blazing sunshine, and they took to walking through the shallows to cool their feet. Seashells dug into the soles of their feet, sometimes crumbling beneath them like broken glass. Shadows skittered and darted through the water as schools of fish and crabs wandered closer and retreated.

  “If we sharpen a few sticks, do you think we can catch those fish?”

  “Now you’re thinking,” Ben said, ruffling his son’s hair. “Matt, we are going to eat like kings. We have an ocean full of fish. And if we can’t catch them, we’ll just have to settle for crab for dinner. Now all we need to find is a french fry tree.” Matt laughed. “Seriously. We’ll be fine as long as we have shelter. We can’t be far from the islands. Someone will find us even if we have to rough it for a few days.”

  As they circled the humpbacked island, nothing seemed to change but the position of the sun on their shoulders. Palms and ferns grew up the terrain toward the island center from all points along the shore. More hawks dive-bombed the shallows, snatching fish out of the water. Matt peered longingly across the rolling waters, searching for signs of land but finding only desolate seas.

  Then a quarter of the way around the island, Ben stopped in his tracks.

  A boat.

  Matt had been looking across the water and had nearly walked right into the back of Ben. When he glanced up, he turned his eyes to his father. They looked again at the boat, unbelieving, as though they had found a glistening mirage of water in the middle of an endless desert. Then Matt grinned, and they darted toward the boat, shouting as they ran.

  “Hello!”

  “Is anyone there?”

  “Help!”

  “We’re stranded!”

  The craft, a small motorboat, rocked to the tempo of the rhythmic waves. A thick, weathered rope tied the bow to the base of a palm bent over the waterline. By the look of the rope—barely frayed in the middle and tightly coiled over the majority of its length—Ben figured the boat had been here at least a few weeks but probably not much longer than that. A few inches of standing water covered the motorboat’s floor, evidence of passing thunderstorms. Bird guano covered the hull as though the boater had been attacked by pirates armed with white paint guns.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and called into the jungle. Matt yelled out, too, turning in a circle as though he expected to find a tourist in a bucket hat wading toward them out of the shallows. They continued for a few minutes, the sensation that something was wrong beginning to eat at Ben.

  “Whoever was here, they are long gone. This boat hasn’t been driven in at least a week or two,” Ben said, pointing to the rainwater inside the boat.

  “I wonder if he got lost like we did.”

  Ben stuck his head inside the boat and saw the fuel gauge needle was a shade above the “E”.

  “Or ran out of fuel. Seeing this boat is good news, though. That confirms what I said about us being close to civilization. It’s not just a coincidence that two boats got lost and found the same island.”

  “Do you think the person might still be here? Maybe he found shelter up the hill.”

  Ben grimaced. The last thing he wanted to do was climb up through that jungle again. Leaves rippled and swayed in the breeze, almost as if the jungle was taunting him. On cue with the laughing wind, a cau
liflower tower of cumulus rose above the water several miles offshore. Its sides were crisp and white in the afternoon sunshine, appearing as a distant bomb blast. Already the underside of the cloud had grown black, as though night congregated there.

  “Speaking of shelter, we had better figure out what we are going to do if it rains. We don’t want to be caught in the open in a lightning storm.”

  Ben led Matt back into the overgrowth, pushing against the thick leaves and stalks to clear a path. The cloud continued to grow over the ocean; and as it rose to cloak the sun, Matt felt a cool shadow sweep down across his neck. He turned his head back to the shore as he walked, longingly watching the motorboat become smaller and smaller, until the jungle wrapped itself around him like a door slamming shut.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Whose boat do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. Could be a fisherman, an islander, or even a sightseer like us.”

  “If he was stranded on the island, where is he now?”

  Ben didn’t want to say what was really on his mind—that the guy was dead somewhere in the jungle, his body crawling with those black beetles. He pressed onward, racing against the building storm to find shelter.

  Matt wrinkled his nose. The air inside the jungle was stagnant, the scent of chlorophyll overwhelming. There was another smell here, too: a smell of decay and death.

  As he climbed up the slope, the damp, black humus under his feet kept slipping out from under him. He fell forward once, caught by a huge cup of fronds that made him feel as though he were a pearl trapped inside a giant clam. Ben pulled him up, and Matt looked back at the massive fronds, thinking that they might grow fangs and swallow him whole the next time he made a mistake.

  A quarter of the way up the slope, Matt’s eye caught a glimpse of light, strangely heliographing in the dappled sunlight. The light seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. It glistened white, yellow, and orange in thin strands. The light bounced between two towering palms. He shivered, realizing the illusion was caused by a humongous spiderweb spanning at least twenty yards. Then, just before the overgrowth blocked his vision, he thought he saw something football-shaped hanging between the trees, suspended by invisible tethers like a magician’s trick. He told himself that it was just a piece of bark from the palms, broken off by the wind and stranded in the webbing; but it had sure looked like the dessicated remains of one of those hawks they kept seeing. But that was ridiculous. A spider couldn’t kill a hawk. Could it? He pressed closer to his father.