by Ike Hamill
Then it happened. “I don’t want you here,” she said. Her eyes got wide when she heard her own words and saw them reflected on his face.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“I don’t want you living here anymore. I want us to split up, and I want you to leave,” she said.
“What? What are you talking about? I’m not going to leave. We’re trying to have a baby, remember? Where did this come from?”
She did remember, and she didn’t know where it was coming from. It was true, they’d been trying to get pregnant again, and it had worked. Well, it had worked for a while. She’d felt the fertilized egg attach itself to the wall of her uterus. She didn’t know much about the process, but she knew anyway. She felt her temperature change and felt some new hormones in her body. She was making the shift to mother again just when her body rejected the new life and flushed it out. She’d never told any of that to Daryl.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind.”
“This isn’t how it works,” said Daryl. He stood up. “You don’t just decide one day to throw away what we’ve got and then announce it casually in the kitchen. You can’t just decide that we’re done. We’ve got a house, and we’re married. We’re trying to have a kid, for Christ’s sake. Are you just going to walk out on our kid too?”
Marta looked at Daryl, her husband, and wondered why her sympathy for him was washing away. She’d always loved him, even when she was mad at him. Where was that love now? Her body was flushing Daryl away—rejecting him as it had rejected his babies.
“I’m not walking out on anything,” said Marta. “I told you, I want you to leave.”
“Well bullshit!” said Daryl. “I’m not leaving. Are you fucking crazy?" He took a step towards Marta. Perhaps he didn’t mean anything by the step, but she backed away until her butt hit the counter. She lowered her eyes to the floor. Her body and mind were in agreement—they both rejected Daryl.
Marta felt the cool flushing energy flowing through her as she cast away her last lingering feelings for him. It felt like a river flowing down through her, from the top of her head down through her feet. It was a flash-flood, a muddy flood moving through her body and tearing at her roots. Her body temperature lowered.
“Marta?” he asked. His voice was much higher and less adamant, less forceful. “Marta, I think there’s something wrong.”
“Yes?” she asked.
“I don’t feel good,” he said. “I feel like there’s a…” he began. He never finished the sentence. Daryl reached forward with his right arm. Marta, still a couple steps away, drew back her left shoulder, like they were dancing at a distance. All at once, Daryl dropped to his knees. His upper body stayed straight up—he looked like someone had simply lowered him twenty inches.
Marta put a hand to her mouth and wondered if she felt shocked or dismayed. She decided she didn’t.
Her hand was on the phone by the time he flopped forward, his face flat on the vinyl floor. She took her hand away, and decided it would be best to be sure before making any calls. His pulse was weak. She could just barely find it on his right wrist, and not at all on his left. She pulled up a chair and sat down for a few minutes to wait. When she checked again, his heart had stopped. That’s when she returned to the phone and made the call.
Marta was crying but not hysterical when the ambulance arrived. The paramedics performed CPR all the way to the hospital where the doctor pronounced Daryl dead.
ONCE THE MOURNERS AND WELL-WISHERS STOPPED dropping by with their condolences and casseroles, Marta thought she’d find time alone. When she stopped accepting invitations to dinner and weekend movies—always a comedy, nothing challenging or dark—the phone calls slowly decreased. All the people in her life felt like fake friends. They were all people that she and Daryl had known together. She’d cut all ties with her own real friends years before.
In small pockets of time that Marta could call her own, she executed her plans step by step.
She began with a box of mice from a pet store in the city. The owner probably thought she had a hungry snake, or perhaps a whole nest of them in her house. Marta didn’t care. She just wanted to get ahold of some animal that she wouldn’t feel any sympathy for, and mice fit the bill. With her first batch she failed to buy them any food—overconfidence in her own ability to dispatch them—and found out how quickly mice will turn to cannibalism if left without food in a small aquarium.
That mistake was easily corrected. Marta threw some bread in the tank and while they were busy with that she lowered a bowl of water into the opposite end. Death was all she had planned for them, but listening to them crunch the bones of the weak was more than she could handle.
When she felt confident and strong, Marta used a set of kitchen tongs to grab the tail of a likely candidate and plucked it out of the tank. She took it to the center of the kitchen table and trapped the little white mouse under a glass bowl. It ran in circles for just a moment and then sat on its haunches in the center of its ring. In that brief time it had already soiled the top of her table.
Marta pulled up her chair and let the her disgust for the rodent blossom in her heart. This was her job now. She could live on savings until Daryl’s insurance came in. She stared at the mouse and tried to feel the flushing in her body. She and the mouse were only a few feet away from where Daryl had collapsed.
The feeling, or power wouldn’t come. The mouse sat, looking at her with one pink eye while the other eye looked out towards the living room. Its whiskers twitched and it held it’s little hands to its mouth like it was whispering tiny secrets to its pink fingers.
“You disgust me,” said Marta. She exhaled and tried to feel the river flow through her body. She could imagine it, but not recreate the feeling. Doubt crept in around the edges of her thoughts. When Daryl died it was clear: her body had reached out and snuffed him—flushed him. Daryl had been a one-hundred and fiftieth trimester abortion. But she had loved Daryl, and had pulled him close before flushing him out. His heart had beat inside hers. He’d been a harmonic of her primary frequency, so she’d been able to shut him off.
Marta realized that she would have to love this mouse. Its trembling, defecating form repulsed her. This mouse, because it was alive, had probably attacked and consumed part of one of the weak mice the night before. She could muster no empathy for such a creature. Marta cast aside those thoughts and tried to picture this mouse struggling for survival out in the wild. She thought of it as an anthropomorphic character in a children’s book, perhaps riding a tiny toy motorcycle. Nothing worked.
“You’re just disgusting,” Marta said to the mouse. She put her chin on her hands and her nose close to the edge of the glass bowl. “You’re a disgusting, germ-ridden, rodent. I’m probably getting fleas right now. Is that what you’re doing? Giving me fleas.”
“Maybe I’ll have to turn you loose in the yard so you can die in the wild. You’ve probably got no survival skills at all, since you grew up in a pet store. What did your mother call you? Was it Gus? Was it Kevin?”
It tickled Marta to call the mouse by a non-pet name. She smiled and forgot her task, and forgot her intentions.
“I’m going to call you Zachary. Zachary the mouse. I bet if you were a person, you’d get mugged at the ATM machine,” she said. The smile melted from her face as she made up a little story for the little mouse. “You probably had your mind set on getting a slice of pizza from that place that only takes cash, didn’t you? Then, you went to get money and when you turned around a guy in a hooded sweatshirt poked you in the ribs with a knife and demanded your money, didn’t he, Zachary?”
She didn’t know where the story was coming from, but she started to feel genuine concern for the fictitious mouse character in her strange story.
“Then you’d just give it to him because you know that your health is worth more than a sweaty wad of cash, right?” she asked. She turned her head.
All at once, she felt Zachary. She felt the d
reams she imagined for him being dashed by his pretend mugging. She let her sympathy build up, like a rising tide. When her eyes had filled with tears and her emotion crested, Marta let it all go. She let the feelings sweep through her like a big wave. She cried for that little mouse. She cried and closed her eyes. Opening them slowly, she saw that her little mouse was now laying on its side.
“No!” she said. Marta tipped over the bowl and stroked the mouse’s body. It didn’t move. Tears gushed from her eyes and she hitched in several sobs. She felt worse than when Daryl had died. This was an intentional kill—premeditated. It was worse that way.
Marta cried for twenty minutes more before bagging the little white mouse. She wrapped it up in four grocery bags and put it in the outside trash. Done with that task, Marta went back to the dry aquarium and pulled out another twitching white test-subject and trapped it under the same bowl on the kitchen table.
The second mouse only took a few minutes before Marta was able to align her sympathies and then strike down the little mouse life.
The third took almost no time at all. Each mouse made her cry. She cried until her head hurt and her cheeks were raw from rubbing away big, hot tears.
That night she barely slept at all. Her trashcan was full of quadruple-bagged little mouse carcasses, and she woke up at least once for each killing. Eventually she’d drift back to sleep only to flop around until she worried herself back awake. A trip to the outside trash confirmed her place in the world—she was becoming a monster—but somehow gave her enough peace of mind to get a little rest.
The next day Marta took a break from rodent extermination, but the day after she found another pet store and she purchased another batch of subjects. She studied the mice, milling around over their feast of bread and water and picked out one with a black spot near the base of its tail. She chose it because it looked fat and healthy. It would probably be the aggressor in any mouse-on-mouse violence, and it appealed to her that he should go first.
Marta didn’t pull the fat mouse from the tank. She got a good look at it and then went back to the kitchen.
The ritual was simple—reach out with her emotions, identify with the mouse, form a connection, and then flush it out.
She sat in the kitchen and tried to picture the mouse in the next room. There was no telling how close she’d ever get to Gregory—she had to be able to perform her skill at a distance. She felt the mice. Even from the next room, if she really concentrated, she could hear them scrambling over each other to get at the bread she’d put in the tank. Marta closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. The fat mouse with the black spot became her friend, her soulmate. Marta pictured and gave him the name Brian. She loved Brian the mouse, and wanted to protect him. She wrapped Brian in her kindest thoughts and imagined him loving her back unconditionally. With Brian the mouse as close as she could fathom, Marta flushed him out, violently, and felt his little mouse life-force push away.
Her tears stopped after a few minutes, and Marta got ahold of herself.
She went to check on Brian the mouse, to rate her own accuracy. The silence didn’t register until she’d entered the little study where her mouse aquarium was housed.
All ten mice had died.
Chapter 14
Hole Island
THE BOAT WAS WAY TOO SMALL. Carol would have known that right away in daylight, but at night it didn’t seem like that big of a problem. They left from around the back side of Atkins bay. Carol didn’t know what Jenko had said to the owner. She couldn’t guess what line he might have fed the man to convince him to rent his boat to a couple of strangers in the middle of the night. She didn’t want to know. She’d sat in the car and waited, expecting him to fail. Instead, he’d knocked on the window and asked her to come along.
In the dark, with only the feeble glow of the dock lights, Carol climbed into the little skiff and half-listened as the man gave Jenko instructions on keeping the outboard engine running. They brought along a blanket and an extra can of gas for the trip. Jenko checked his phone often, to consult the GPS. In the bay the swells were low and well-behaved. Around the spit of land, the little boat rose on each oncoming bump and thudded down into the troughs. They were soaked in no time.
Carol pulled the heavy blanket around her shoulders to shield her from the spray. Her ankle ached. In the car Jenko had wrapped her leg in a stretchy bandage and given her a couple of pills—he’d called them aspirin. She’d stolen two more from Jenko’s bottle while he was talking with the boat guy.
Jenko piloted the boat through a series of jagged turns so he could keep the swells from tipping over the boat. When his GPS said they were fairly close to the island, Jenko killed the engine and pulled out the oars. He wanted Carol to switch places so he could row, but Carol told him to stay put. She was chilled and wanted the exercise. Her muscles missed the digging. They were tensed and ready to engage.
With the first pull her arms felt better. As her back warmed to the job, she stretched and enjoyed getting her blood pumping again.
Jenko put a hand on her knee and signaled her to stop when they were close to the black shore. Carol pulled in the oars and Jenko slid past her to the bow. The lapping waves nudged them close to the rocks and Jenko jumped out with his bag in one hand and the bow rope in the other. He held the rope so Carol could climb out too. Together they heaved the boat, pulled it up onto the rocks, and then carried above the tide-line. The stern of the boat was heavy and Jenko nearly had to drag it up the rocks when Carol couldn’t hold up her end.
Together they crested the weatherbeaten shore and stood atop the first rise of the island.
“You can still just barely see the glowing stuff,” said Jenko. He pointed off towards the island they had walked to earlier that night. “But I’m pretty sure this is the right island.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” said Carol.
“How’s that?”
“It’s not very big,” said Carol. “If there’s something here, it shouldn’t take us that long to find it.”
Jenko shrugged in the dark. He consulted his phone’s map again and compared it to what he could make out in the starlight. The island was small, but it was several times larger than the island they’d been on earlier. To his mind the challenge was not that they had a large area to search, it was that they had no idea what they were looking for. It would be easier to hunt in daylight, but he was glad they had the cover of darkness.
“Let’s walk the perimeter,” said Jenko. “Then we can do a grid search.”
“Okay,” said Carol.
Walking the perimeter of the island was hellish in the dark. Carol’s ankle throbbed against the tight bandage, but all things considered, it held up okay.
Jenko admitted defeat when they got back to their original rock and could see the boat below them. The eastern horizon was just starting to glow with the dawn.
“I don’t think there’s anything here,” said Jenko. “We’ve seen about all there is to see.”
“What about your grid search?” asked Carol.
“There’s nothing more to do,” said Jenko. “If there were anything here we would have found it by now.”
“We haven’t been to the center,” said Carol.
“But we’ve seen it from all sides,” said Jenko. “Okay, fine,” he reconsidered.
They descended their little hill and walked towards the center of the island. The rocks rose up again near the center. It was easier to climb now that some ambient light had softened the black edges. At the top of the next hill they could see the island all around them, surrounded by the ocean. In the pure darkness, they might have missed it, but now that they had a little light, Jenko spotted the hole.
He circled it, giving it a wide perimeter. Carol followed close behind.
The very center of the island dropped down into a hole. Jenko found an edge sloped enough that they could make their way down. The other edges were too steep. He started down and turned back to Carol.
“Come on
, it’s not too bad,” he said.
“I’m not going down there,” she replied.
“Why not? This is it,” said Jenko.
“I’ve been in holes like that,” she said. “They’re evil. I spent too much time in those things.”
“I’m not even sure this is man-made,” said Jenko. “I think it’s just a hole in the rocks, and it’s the only place we haven’t investigated. We have to check it out—it’s our last chance to find whatever Don wanted us to discover.”
“I don’t care,” said Carol. “I’m not going.”
“Fine,” said Jenko. He sat his bag down and dug around in it. He straightened up, moved a couple more steps down the slope, and pointed a flashlight into the hole.
“You’ve got a light?” she asked. “How come we didn’t use that earlier.”
“Too obvious,” he explained.
Her eyes were drawn to the spot of light. They craved it after being in the darkness. The small spot of light suggested warmth and safety. She suddenly felt very alone, standing up on the edge of the hole.
“Okay, I’m coming,” she said. She caught up to Jenko pretty quickly. He pointed his light back towards her so she could see her footing. When she reached his back he handed the light to her and pulled another from his bag.
Their hole turned into a shallow cave. It trailed off as the rounded wall ended at a dirty pool of water. Jenko shined his light around and studied the walls. At their feet, an overhanging rock disguised a hole in the wall. Jenko knelt to look up into it. He pushed his bag up into the hole and then shimmied in after it.
“Where does it go?” asked Carol. She crouched down next to the wall but didn’t look into the hole. She hoped it was a dead end so she wouldn’t have to crawl in after Jenko. The hole was about the size of a car window, so it was plenty big enough to fit through, but the idea of squeezing through it made Carol’s teeth ache.