by Dan Padavona
Ben could no longer tell any portion of the jungle apart from any other. In all directions was a sickly, green version of one of Grimm’s haunted forests. There were no pathways—only masses of thick stems, huge leaves, and blackness ahead. Sometimes they brushed against a stout stem, and water pooled within the fronds rained down on them. The water always felt slimy, as though it had coagulated with the jungle.
A thin vine appeared this far up the slope, snaking around fronds and stalks like a python. Ben wondered again about the dangers of poisonous snakes on an isolated island. It seemed unlikely, but in the foreboding darkness of the island jungle anything seemed possible. He began to look up with trepidation and step more carefully.
He could hear Matt breathing heavily, almost wheezing. The boy ran track and played basketball, but the suffocating humidity was taking its toll on him.
“Hey, let’s slow down a bit,” Ben said, again ruffling Matt’s hair, which felt like a wet mop in his hand. Matt bent over, hands on knees. His breathing didn’t sound right, almost asthmatic. “Maybe we should turn around and get back to the fresh air.”
“No,” Matt said, his breathing slowing. “I’m fine. We gotta find shelter, right?”
“Yeah, but we’re walking around blind. Tell you what, let’s cut a diagonal back to the right of where we started. We’ll cover more territory, and if worst comes to worst, we’ll hit shore.”
But as they turned to go, something scurried across the jungle floor several yards away. It had been large enough to shake stems and cause an impromptu shower from the upper leaves of the canopy.
“What was that?” Matt was watching the blackness into which the thing had crawled, wary that it might come back.
“Dunno. It was big, though. Probably a rat.”
“That wasn’t a rat. Besides, how would a rat get onto an island in the middle of the ocean?”
“Are you kidding? Those damn things are everywhere.”
But Ben was watching the gloom, too, chewing on his lip. His body tensed. He felt the urge to pull Matt back from the jungle where the thing had crawled. Jesus, I hope it was just a rat.
There came a rumble that sounded like a bowling ball rolling along a sky-length alley.
Thunder. They were running out of time.
Ben pulled Matt behind him and began to cut diagonally downslope. The way down was faster—almost too fast. The loose soil kept giving way. Ben and Matt each grabbed stalks and palm trunks to catch themselves. The sky, now a milky white overhead, began to reveal itself through the dense canopy as they descended the slope. The wind was picking up, too, a salty breeze that snaked its way through the fronds and cooled their skin. But Ben could not take comfort in the breeze, for he knew that it foretold of stormy weather, and they were still without shelter.
He strained to keep from screaming, panic locked behind his throat, fearing that his son would see it on his face. Here he was: trapped on an unknown island off the Lesser Antilles, preparing to die of a lightning strike that could just as easily kill him on Cape Cod or in some burg in Nebraska.
There was a silent tension in the air, like a coiled spring, and he thought he could smell ozone. Then lightning ripped across the sky, fiery fingers tearing a hole through building gray. He was counting the seconds in his head, knowing that a five second delay between lightning and thunder meant the strike was a mile away. Thunder rumbled before he reached four, rolling through the ground as though a volcano was about to erupt.
The panic was pushing past his throat now, rushing outward like a rancid, roiling vapor that was sure to destroy Matt’s confidence. The wind became a force, ripping leaves and sending the jungle into a frenzied dance. He felt his hair stand on end, and as he turned to yell for Matt to hit the ground, a blinding bolt of lightning struck the shore, followed immediately by an explosion of thunder that shook palms and caused the ground to buckle.
As Ben and Matt ducked under a pair of palms, the wind parted the leaves to reveal something different just ahead of their path. It appeared dark and depthless, as though a small portion of night had broken from the sky and fallen to this permanent jungle prison, where it lay stranded under the unrelenting sun. Ben could see Matt squinting his eyes, staring toward the unknown source of darkness. Without thinking, he grabbed Matt by the elbow and started forward.
Thunder pealed through the jungle, and Ben could feel, rather than see the lightning that spoked between two black clouds which had rushed over the island. The depthless hole drew nearer, and then it took form—a cave. As their eyes met, Ben had a wide grin on his face. How could he have been so lucky? He had found the perfect shelter hidden in the almost impenetrable jungle. Without another word, they sprinted toward the cave as the first huge, tropical raindrops splattered onto overhead fronds.
There were none of the rocks one might expect outside the entrance to a cave. In fact, as they ducked inside of the five-foot wide circular entrance, it seemed more a tunnel than a cave, as though a Jurassic era worm had burrowed into the side of the loamy hill. The light fell away a few yards ahead, and Ben realized uneasily that any sort of animal could be inside the tunnel just beyond their view. An animal with razors for claws and jaws that could bite through a leg bone. That was crazy, of course. There were no dangerous animals on these islands. But as he rested his back against the earthen sides of the tunnel, his eyes kept wandering toward the edge of darkness, a prickling fear running up his legs.
Rain was pouring in torrents across the tunnel opening, giving Ben the impression of standing behind a waterfall. The water roared as it cascaded over the tunnel, a vertical stream choked with bits of plant and clumps of black, runny earth.
“Good thing we found this cave. We almost got stuck in that,” Ben said, pointing to the deluge.
Matt eyes were watching the unmoving black as he said, “This doesn’t seem like any cave I ever heard of.” Caves, Matt knew, formed within soluble rocks, carved out over centuries by water. This tunnel appeared to be a burrow. As his eyes traveled over the dirt walls, he remembered the huge bugs from the jungle interior, and he shuddered.
Thunder bowled through the island interior again.
The outside air, redolent of ozone, salt water, and the soaked, fecund jungle floor, pushed into the tunnel as the wind rushed at them. When the cool raindrops splashed against their faces, they instinctively slid several yards deeper into the tunnel. The darkness did not recede as they moved toward its border. If anything it seemed to press closer, like a living thing. The earthen walls felt like cold, dead hands on their backs.
Matt was seated closest to the gloom, his shoulder almost butting up against it. Ben crouched over and moved around him, so that he was the first line of defense should anything rush out of the darkness at them. But as he put his foot down, icy fear gripped him—there was no ground under his foot.
Before he could catch his balance, Ben slid downward. Matt saw nothing in the blackness. Nothing except the faint ghost of his father, eyes wide, mouth locked in a silent scream, his face a witch mask. Matt reached for his father, but he was gone faster than his screaming voice could die against the earthen walls.
“Dad! Dad!”
Then silence. Dead silence.
Matt inched forward, careful not to drop over the unseen cliff. His heart was pounding, his head thrumming so hard he thought he might faint. He couldn’t see a thing. All about him, the air had taken on a horrible odor, like decaying animals. The blackness before him was palpable, like some gelatinous alien dimension that his father had vanished into. He thought that if he stuck his arm into the gloom, it would be enveloped in something wet and toxic.
There was a scream poised at his lips, yet Matt could not scream, for he was frozen where he stood, crippled by sensory overload. His father—vanished into the bowels of the earth. Himself—stranded with no idea where he was or if he would ever see another living soul.
He inched forward a little more, his feet sliding through loose soil that felt sticky, alm
ost like walking on fly paper.
“D-Dad?”
And then something grabbed his ankle.
He screamed.
“It’s okay, Matt. It’s me.”
The relief that poured through Matt was so thorough that he nearly crumbled.
“I thought…thought you -”
“I slid down into the tunnel. It’s on a sharp diagonal. Too sharp for me to crawl out of on my own. I’ll need you to give me a hand.”
Matt bent down toward his father’s hand—the grip vise-tight around his ankle—toward where his father’s voice seemed to rise out of the earth. Just as he was about to grip his father’s wrist, he pulled his hand back as though a scorpion was poised to strike. A dark thought crossed his mind—what if that isn’t my father. What if my father is dead and the voice I hear is one of the devils that pulled him into that hole.
“C’mon, Matt. I can’t hold on much longer.”
Matt grasped his father’s wrist with both hands and pulled. As his feet dug into the soft earth, he could feel his father’s body struggling to pull out of the tunnel.
“A little further, Matt. Almost…”
Matt dug in harder, leaning back, feeling the veins in his neck tighten like wound springs. Then Ben was out of the tunnel, panting on the earthen floor, as thunder rolled from the ocean into the gloom.
Lightning flashed—three rapid strokes that lit the tunnel interior like a strobe light. Matt, looking past his father, fell backward into the murky light at the tunnel entrance. Ben saw Matt’s face turn chalk-white, his mouth hanging open as though he wanted to yell but had forgotten how to form words.
The three strobed flashes, snapshots of some amusement park haunted house ride come to life, left Matt without a firm grip on reality. He had seen…surely his eyes must have played tricks…no, he had seen a man—empty sockets for eyes, body dessicated as though something had drained the lifeblood out of him—cocooned to the tunnel wall beyond the drop off. A silken web stretched across his body, descending into the tunnel beyond his vision. The intricate pattern and the sheer size of the webbing were familiar to him. He had seen the same pattern enveloping the palms where the hawk had been wrapped like so much pigskin. And then he had seen the gaping hole in the dead man’s chest cavity, long, hairless legs rising out of the orifice like the demon fingers of a ghoul crawling out of an open grave.
“Matt! What is it?”
Matt was staring toward his father’s voice, seeing only darkness, praying that the lightning would not penetrate the tunnel interior again.
“Matt! Talk to me. What happened?”
“Get away from there, Dad.”
“What—”
“Get out of the tunnel!”
As Ben crawled toward the gray, a skittering sound came from the earthen ceiling. Something hissed behind him, like gas escaping. And then a spider, bigger than any spider Ben had ever believed could exist, shot down from the top of the tunnel on a nearly invisible strand of web. It was hairless like a black widow, as big as a softball, eight legs dancing maniacally as it descended.
Ben screamed in disgust and terror, trying to pull his arm away from the spider’s path. The spider was too fast. Fangs like daggers penetrated flesh on the top of Ben’s right hand. He whipped his arm, and the thing flew back into the darkness, hissing. Abruptly, Ben’s flesh felt as though acid were eating through it. A sharp, fiery pain shot up his arm, and his muscles spasmed.
“Dad! What was that thing?”
Matt pulled his father by the arm into the driving rain, no longer caring about the thunderstorm. Ben crawled on all fours out of the tunnel, his right arm shaking like the legs of a newborn pony. He turned to face the tunnel, the rain thrumming down on his head. Something hissed from within the darkness, and he darted back from the tunnel opening.
Matt grabbed his father’s right hand. Two deep incisions, already a sickly purple and pus-filled, marked where the spider had struck. Ben looked at his hand—which looked more like a clown’s hand now than a human’s—and averted his eyes.
“Jesus.”
“Was that thing…is it poisonous?”
“How the hell should I know?” Ben was breathing heavily as water ran in thin rivulets down his face. Then his eyes softened. “I’m sorry…sorry, Matt. Hell, I don’t even know what kind of spider that was.”
“How does your arm feel?”
“My arm?” Ben looked down his arm. A redness, almost like a fever rash, had spread from the base of his wrist to just shy of his elbow. “It…burns. Goddammit. It’s like my skin is on fire.”
Matt pulled his waterlogged t-shirt over his head; then he wrapped it tightly about itself and tied it around his father’s arm below the elbow.
“You think that will help?” Ben asked. Matt shook his head noncommittally. “In the tunnel…you saw something.”
The little blood that had returned to Matt’s face drained out again. He wanted to believe the lightning had fooled his eyes, that it had somehow evoked a waking nightmare out of him. His body shivering despite the oppressive humidity, he told his father what the lightning had revealed within the tunnel. Ben collapsed against the curved trunk of a palm.
“The boater,” Matt whispered.
“Yeah,” Ben said, eyes fixed on the blackened entrance.
Thunder roared once more, like a dinosaur resurrected. The storm sounded more distant now, the rain falling in smaller droplets. The eastern sky was black as night, while the western horizon was a volatile mixture of ragged, gray clouds and thin strands of sun vying for the ocean surface.
“The boat,” Matt said. “Could we use the firewood we gathered as oars?”
As he watched the first God rays penetrate the clouds to turn the western waters golden, Ben clutched his right arm above the elbow. “One piece of wood against the ocean? Not likely. Not that I would know, bud. It’s not like I ever tried to paddle across an ocean before.”
“At least we’d be off the island,” Matt said, looking warily back toward the tunnel.
Ben nodded. The spiders had added a whole new element of danger to the jungle. He would rather be anywhere but on the island once nightfall approached. But it was a hell of a risk. Once they were a hundred yards from shore, they would be at the whim of the ocean current. They could just as easily end up in the middle of the Atlantic, or fall off the edge of the earth, as find their way back to civilization.
“You know, there looked like there was a tiny bit of fuel left. Maybe enough to get us started and keep us going for five or ten minutes.”
“How are you going to start the engine? We don’t have the keys.”
“I bet I know where the keys are,” Ben said, staring intently into the tunnel. Matt’s eyes widened in realization.
“No way, Dad. You can’t go back in there.”
Ben thought if he could fashion a torch and find a way to ignite it, that he could get in and out of the tunnel quickly enough to avoid the spiders. As water poured off jungle leaves and cascaded onto the black, muddy earth, he knew there would be no easy way to get a fire started in this humidity.
Emerging from behind separating clouds, the sun swept in flaxen tones across the rhythmic sea, turning the water to liquid gold. The orb, taking an accelerating westward track, was a deeper orange than it had been prior to the rains—almost bloody. There were only a few hours of daylight remaining.
“Okay. I’ll have to find another way to start the engine.”
Ben led Matt through the dripping jungle toward the shoreline. The sun was strong above the canopy, but water spilled out of the leaves in buckets, making it seem as though they were walking through a cloudburst. Matt’s eyes kept drifting through the tangle of green, searching for more telltale webbing. Once he had seen something glistening among a set of squat palms, its edges flashing like a mirage as a strand of sunlight penetrated the canopy. Then his forward movement took him past, and the jungle swallowed the view.
As the shoreline materialized throu
gh the thick jungle border, Ben leaned on Matt for support, his head swimming in a murky dizziness that was not the result of heat exhaustion. Matt looked at him with concern etched on his face.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
“I’ll be fine. Just get me to that boat.”
Taking care to walk through the shallows, they stumbled along the shoreline, keeping several feet between them and the thick vegetation. As Matt and Ben continued southward, their shadows grew long, stretching across the shore until their shadows were consumed at the jungle’s edge. Palms, which individually might have appeared idyllic in another setting, curved like hulking monsters in sentry formation along the wilderness periphery, the dying sun bathing them in bloody tones. Heavy, skittering noises rose out from the jungle interior. The sounds seemed to be moving closer.
The boat had taken on an additional inch of water but otherwise seemed exactly as they had left it. Ben climbed into the craft on trembling legs, beginning to feel feverish. He could feel Matt’s eyes on him, but there was no time for worry. He had to think. If he could figure out how to hot-wire the boat, if the engine started, and if there was enough fuel to get them a few miles into the sea…
So many ifs. He bent low and yanked the key switch cover off.
As he studied the wiring, he thought about the trip out of St. Kitts. They had left westward, the sun on their backs. After they had become lost, Ben was sure the sun had generally been in his face or just off to his left as he had attempted to reverse course. That meant he was probably somewhere south and west of his desired target. Trying to envision a map of the islands, he believed a straight westward track would lead them into the middle of nowhere. A northeastward track had the highest potential to get them back to St. Kitts or one of the nearby islands. A north-northeast track would run them close to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic if they were lucky. Straight south would run them into Venezuela, but that trip would take days, and they had no way to steer the boat once the motor died.