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The Island: Two Stories of Terror

Page 4

by Dan Padavona


  As the boys’ mother yelled at them for the last time to pack their gear in her beach bag, the younger brother crafted tiny holes for windows with his fingers, wondering what the fuss was about. The mother watched the shadows of the pier stretch like gnarled fingers across the sand toward her children, eyes fixed warily on the boat which slid on the tide between sand and water. Something unsettled her about the boat, which appeared skeletal and black in the dying light.

  Now the shadows raced across water and sand, like ink pouring out of the heavens. She realized with sudden panic that she could no longer see her children, who were swallowed whole by the encroaching darkness. She called again, and as the frantic edge in her voice cut through the gloom like a machete, something spilled over the side of the boat onto the wet sand. A black mass of writhing legs reached into the night air; and then it flipped itself over to its stomach and crept toward the kingdom of sand. The bloated spider was huge, very hungry, and very pregnant. It lunged toward the shapes which surrounded the castle, fangs dripping with venom, just as the woman’s hands reached forward to drag her protesting children away from the water.

  As she hurried the children off the beach toward the ocher lights of their resort, she heard a hissing sound, like the sand had opened up to a pit of snakes. Then something skittered across the beach behind them, moving toward the deeper shadows of lush flora between the beach and the resort. The woman dragged the boys along faster, not stopping when the younger brother lost his flip-flops or when the older brother stumbled over the smooth planks of the palm-lined boardwalk.

  She ran with held breath, convinced that the devil himself had emerged from the ocean waters, not stopping to breathe until she and the boys were inside the resort, doors closed to the night. And then, as her children bleated over stubbed toes and lost shoes, she looked into the mass of ferns and palm fronds. There was something creeping through the shadows. She rushed the boys toward the elevator doors, desperate to put more walls between her and the night.

  One Autumn in Kane Grove

  The autumn of Kane Grove was born teetering on the edge of extinction.

  As the wind whistled a frigid requiem against the outer walls of the university library’s computer wing, I saw myself quoted on the internet, this time on one of those big news websites like the ones that cover presidential primaries, the Dow Jones, and Middle-Eastern wars. The quote was nebulous, and honestly I don't remember much about it, except that a mousy female reporter had stuck her smart phone in my face as I was hurrying across the quad, trying to get to my calculus class before 3 p.m.

  Before this autumn I don't think anyone outside of New York even knew Kane Grove College existed; now you can turn on CNN and see the campus, the Jamison Sciences tower pointing into the milky sky like a fleshless finger, as harried students hustle by in the foreground.

  Dad blames the university.

  “This sort of thing doesn't happen at Hamilton or Bowdoin,” he told me on the phone last week. “Take next semester off, and get your applications filled out. Someone as smart as you shouldn't be wasting time at a school like Kane.”

  Mom just sits and cries, worried sick that I'm going to be next.

  On September 21st, autumn rolled into upstate New York like a January tidal wave off Nova Scotia, and campus police found the first body. As I ran up University Avenue, the sharp edges of textbooks inside my knapsack stabbing into my back, I cursed under my breath for not wearing anything heavier than a sweatshirt.

  Chill and wicked, the wind whipped across the Finger Lakes like a petulant child that refused to wait for Christmas. Sunset was but an hour away, and though the hour was late and the sky a boiling mass of slate gray, I remember how much the failing light bothered my eyes, a surefire sign of a monster migraine encroaching.

  A girl with her head lowered into her chest passed in the other direction, a pretty little ghost train racing to stay ahead of winter. Apparently she hadn't read or believed the weather report either because she wore cutoff jean shorts and a tank top that slouched off one shoulder. Her flip-flops slapped against the concrete to a frantic tempo that echoed staccato-like off the brick facades of bordering dormitories. It wasn't until I guiltily stole a glance at her from behind that I realized the girl was Kari Morton.

  Halfway up the hill to my dormitory, Lee Hall, I scarfed down a slice of white pizza from the Bethany Union cafeteria. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, which was probably the reason I started getting a headache, and hell if I didn't want to take refuge from the biting cold for a few minutes. Big mistake. Fifteen minutes later I was hunched over and heaving something that looked like pizza into a toilet as I thought about whose ass I was going to kick for giving me food poisoning. I don't remember how I ended up in my dorm room or falling asleep on my bed.

  Around 10 p.m. my roommate, Mitch Hollingsworth, wearing a Make Art Not War t-shirt, excitedly whipped our door open, denting the plaster with an outline of the knob. To my delicate ears it sounded like a shotgun blast.

  “What do you think about Kari Morton?”

  “What?” The room was spinning as if I had just stepped off one of those playground merry-go-rounds that used to make me nauseous.

  “Holy crap, Dan. What the hell is wrong with you?” I don’t think Mitch was concerned about my health so much as he didn’t want to catch whatever it was I had. He took a step backward.

  “Food poisoning. Bad pizza. I’d stay away from Bethany if I were you.”

  “That sucks, but you gotta hear this,” he raced on, evidently no longer concerned about whether I might roll over and die. “Campus security found Kari Morton dead near the quad.”

  “Dead?”

  “Murdered.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Is there an echo in here?”

  I felt like someone punched me in the teeth.

  “The cops are everywhere. But that isn’t the craziest part,” Mitch said, and by the way he emphasized the last part I sensed it had been killing him to get to the gory details. “The guy who did it must have been a total wacko. He stabbed her in the neck.”

  As I thought about Kari racing past me on University Avenue, so close I could have touched her bare shoulders or breathed the mango-scented shampoo in her bouncing, brunette curls, a chill ran through my bones, like a phantom passed right through me.

  “What time did this happen?”

  “After dark. Probably 7:30 or 8 o’clock.”

  When had I passed her? Ninety minutes prior to her murder, if that.

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “You know Sam from chem lab? Well, he knows this dude from Randall Hall that was at the front of the police barricade when they were zipping her up.”

  “Zipping her up?”

  “Body bag, duh.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I feel like shit. I might skip psych tomorrow morning.”

  “Yeah, man. Sleep in. You look like spoiled yogurt. Smell like it, too.”

  “Up yours. Do the police know who killed her?”

  “No. But Sam knows this other dude who says Kari broke up with some townie she was dating.”

  “Kari dated a townie?”

  “I know, right? Big guy. Football player or something. Sam says he was nuts. Freaking nuts. But what do you expect from a gap-toothed, tobacco-spittin’ townie?”

  “Oh sure, everyone’s hometown is backwards except for the one you came from,” said a female voice from around the corner. Appearing in the doorway, Gina Artuso wore a concerned look on her face.

  Self-consciously pulling the blanket toward my face, I felt the heat in my cheeks. God, I didn’t want her to see me like this. Gina stood by my bedside now, curly blonde locks draped over her shoulder. “Is it the pandemic?”

  “Yeah. You’ll be dead by morning.”

  “Then I guess you aren’t taking me out for pizza Friday night?”

  Just hearing the word pizza sent my stomach
roiling again.

  “Just something I ate. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  **

  The next morning I skipped psychology and slept straight through chemistry, too. Stumbling out of bed at noon, I felt as though I had the worst hangover of my life.

  Having missed my only classes of the day, I ventured out at one o’clock on legs that shook as much from disquiet as they did from food poisoning. The quad bustled with conversation. I looked at everyone a little differently, and they did the same to me.

  The sun was out again, and the way that it glared off the white concrete made my head feel as if it was trapped inside a vise. Nevertheless, I fought the urge to wear sunglasses, wanting to appear as inconspicuous as possible, the way you might keep your hands out of your pockets in an unfamiliar convenience store so nobody gets the mistaken impression you are shoplifting or hiding a handgun.

  Except for a few lone individuals hurrying between classes, most everyone on the quad was broken into groups which quickly formed, broke up, and reformed like transient football huddles. The rumble of conversation drifted out of the concentric gatherings, bits and pieces catching on the wind.

  “...knew a guy who knew someone who dated her last year.”

  “...gouged out her throat.”

  “She was such a pretty girl. Why would someone…”

  “Some asshole townie…”

  Amid the disorganized groups crawled a small army of police and campus security, each faction vying for dominance over the investigation. For the next three days the cops buzzed about like worker bees, and then the university returned to normalcy, Kari’s murder a baleful whisper on the wind.

  A sea of charcoal-gray clouds rolled overhead during the first week of October in concert with a Lake Ontario wind that cut through double-layered sweatshirts and sweatpants and demanded we grudgingly don winter jackets. The coldest autumn air mass the northeast had seen in twenty years poured into Kane Grove.

  My afternoon migraines came and went like the tide, but they became frequent enough that Mitch threw me into his car one afternoon and drove me to a nearby walk-in clinic. A graying doctor with a combination pencil-thin mustache and disheveled hairdo which made him look like a cross between Clark Gable and Albert Einstein poked and prodded me for thirty minutes. He gave me the usual rest and relaxation advice doctors give to people with head colds and advanced stages of cancer. Three days later I received a voicemail from his office stating my white count was low and I needed to eat more fruits and vegetables.

  The campus buzz over Kari Morton dissipated to the occasional nervous whisper before the Kane Grove police department found the second body—a twenty-something woman in her third year of teaching at Medwick Elementary School three blocks north of campus. Her name was Maryann Neville. Reading the story in the GROVE PRESS, I shivered. I knew well the area around Medwick and often biked there when the weather was more reasonable.

  I felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu as I studied her smiling face on the front page. Pulled back into a ponytail, her blonde hair had a vibrant glow that the black-and-white medium couldn’t suppress. Far be it from me to forget a pretty face. Surely in a town as small as Kane Grove we had happened upon one another in a grocery store checkout line or downtown bar. Perhaps I had brushed up against her in Starbucks, our eyes meeting as her lips curled into a smile.

  Miss Neville had stayed past dark to fight her way through a backlog of homework assignments. As desiccated leaves rained in variegated oranges around Miss Neville on the evening of October 4th, she rushed toward her vehicle in the deserted school parking lot. Her shoes scuffled against the concrete, and leaves crunched underfoot like the cackle of witches as the long, black fingers of lamppost shadows reached across the parking lot. She had nearly reached her blue Prius, a lifeless slate in the moonlight, when—

  Her body was found at midnight by Harley Bouchard, an overnight janitor who had stepped outside for a smoke and a look at the stars. He found Neville lifelessly staring into a depthless sky, a considerable chunk missing from her neck.

  There came considerable debate over the nature of her wound. The police referred to it as a deep gouge, possibly from a knife or some other sharp implement, while the coroner controversially suggested the wound was more consistent with an animal attack. But the macabre debate between the police and coroner was drowned out by the holy war being waged between the town of Kane Grove and its university.

  Hysterical and dripping with vigilantism, commentary in the town’s GROVE PRESS purported the Neville murder was retaliation by university students for the murder of Kari Morton. Some called for the university to be closed indefinitely until the murderer was rooted out. The argument seemed shallow since there were no suspects in the Morton murder, despite water cooler talk of the psychotic townie boyfriend.

  There is a thicket on campus that stretches from the hill dormitories at the top of University Avenue down past the backside of the buildings along the northern border of the quad. Buckled into humps by subterranean tree roots and brutally long winters, a blacktop walkway side winds through the thicket down to Branson Creek Road. The thicket path is a preferred route for most students, as it provides a shortcut to both the quad and to two convenience stores just north of campus.

  By the end of the first week of October, the path through the thicket developed a sense of foreboding, as though a great weight pushed down on it. I had just come from the store on a Monday evening, and as I climbed the path the wind groaned through the tree tops in a spectral dirge. I huddled against the bitter wind that seemed determined to force its way inside of me.

  Skeletal trees rose black all around me, with still a few dried leaf carcasses left to drift earthward. I jumped each time I heard tree limbs rubbing against each other, sounding as though saws were cutting through bone. I quickened my pace, expecting something to jump out at me from the trees. Heart racing, I emerged to ashen parking lot lamplight behind the Jamison Sciences tower. I hurried forward without looking back, feeling as if I had escaped a haunted house

  When I entered the student center in the heart of the quad, a black, boiling cauldron of hysteria overtook the students. I learned from one breathless girl that Kari Morton’s body had been stolen from Pineview Cemetery in her hometown outside of Syracuse. Some students supported the notion that townies were responsible.

  The idea that a vigilante group of Kane Grove citizens had driven forty miles to desecrate a teenage girl’s gravesite was preposterous; but it didn’t quell the coming week’s vandalism and fistfights spreading through Kane Grove like air rippling outward from a bomb blast.

  **

  Though my headaches lessened into mid-October, my sleep became more fitful. When I dreamed, I often found myself within the thicket, the gnarled limbs of barren trees reaching toward me, the bitter wind the screams of Kari Morton and Maryann Neville.

  After the third body, a sensual, redheaded university junior named Laila Jennings, was discovered by a campus security patrolman a week before Halloween, Kane Grove College entered into panic. While some of us had known the Morton girl, and none had much idea who the teacher from town was, everyone had known Laila.

  She was known as Three Degrees of Laila, for if you didn’t know someone who knew someone who had had intimate relations with her, you apparently didn’t get out very much. I sat behind her in modern poetry class last spring, my eyes following along the curves of her smooth legs and searching down low-cut shirts whenever she bent to retrieve her bookbag.

  The campus cop who found her had been walking along the shadowed walkway between the five-story library and the student center, his flashlight beam cutting across the pallid concrete in erratic, nervous sweeps. The beam happened upon a heel on the edge of the sidewalk, and then as he gasped, the light found Laila, legs akimbo, body splayed in the grass at the base of the student center ten yards from the shoe. A large chunk of flesh was missing from the right side of the neck.

  The next morning we were dou
ble-barrel blasted by two rumors which swept through the university. This time the police agreed with the coroner—the gaping hole in the side of Laila’s neck was more consistent with an animal attack than that made by a weapon. No sooner did this piece of news begin to make its rounds than we learned the body of Maryann Neville had vanished from a cemetery near Albany.

  It didn’t take long for the more imaginative and delirious among us to suggest the attacks were not those of man or animal but rather of supernatural origin. Perhaps the bodies were not disappearing from grave sites but were leaving on their own.

  The word vampire was probably first whispered over lattes and bagels at the student center. Promulgating like a disease, the concept spread through email and over too many drinks at the bars until it became accepted fact that Nosferatu walked among us.

  Feeding off the hysteria, every media faction—from local reporters to occult bloggers and national news outlets—swooped down upon us like hungry grackles two days prior to Halloween. That was the same day the female reporter wrestled an incongruous quote from me as I rushed to class. I am certain, quite certain, I had scoffed at the idea of the killer being a vampire. Yet somehow a modernized and bizarre version of the telephone game ensued, and my quote morphed through several iterations, until a national news website had me purporting that Bela Lugosi was running amok.

  It was not my parents’ proudest moment.

  By now Mom and Dad started leaving me daily voicemails of their intentions to drive to Kane Grove and bring me home. But I couldn’t leave. As frightened as I was, the frenzy attracted me, the way rubberneckers slow down on the highway to watch the bodies being removed from a wreck. Besides, things were starting to progress between Gina and me, and I wasn’t about to leave her alone on campus with a psycho killer.

 

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