Venice runs to me, blocking me with his body. “It’s the ship. It’s bewitched,” he says. “We have to get off.”
“I’m not going anywhere. The snakes will kill us all,” Merk says and fires a shot. The whole world goes silent, even the waves. I dive down to the deck, pulling Venice with me.
When I realize I’m not dead I open my eyes; I’m still clinging to my brother’s shirt. He gently pushes me off of him. “It’s okay, Pen, I’ll take care of it. It’s okay.” Then he stands again and yells, “Merk! There aren’t any snakes. You almost shot at your daughter. We have to get off this ship. We’re under some kind of spell.”
Merk stares out at the water. “Serpents of hell.” He lifts his ragged face to the night sky.
“We need to leave,” Venice says. “You killed the snakes, Merk. Now we can leave.”
Merk points up. We all look. Something bright arcs across the firmament, over our heads.
“A shooting star,” Merk says. “A sign. It’s a sign! Like from that book. That book you have at home. Even the survival of that book is a sign. We must take a journey to find the new world!” He turns to me, pointing his finger. “You are the founder of the new world! You! It has been prophesied.”
“Yes, sure, okay,” Venice says. “But we have to get supplies first. We have to get off this ship, okay?” He enunciates each word as if speaking to a child.
Merk slumps down to the deck and holds his head. “Grace!” he cries. “Grace, forgive me.”
“She wants you to leave,” says Venice. “We all have to leave, okay? Come on, Pen. Hex. Ez. Ash.” Saying our names as if he’s trying to help us recall who we are. He doesn’t say Kronen’s name. I touch my empty socket.
I must have said his name because Venice says, “He’s dead, Pen. That man is dead. You killed him.”
“Tell us the story of how you killed him?” He turns to Ash and Ez who’ve joined us. “Sing us the story, Ash. Remember how Pen killed Kronen?” Digging in his pocket he pulls out a small piece of chalk. “I bet you could draw it, Ez. How Pen killed Kronen? You can do it.”
Ez, Ash, and I all stare at each other. Then Ash closes his eyes, takes a deep breath as if about to throw himself into battle, and begins to sing. The music floats over me like a dark vapor. I can’t really make out the words but the sounds form images in my mind—a man in a jacket made of dried skin with a Giant of his own creation looming behind him. My hands holding a sword. You killed Kronen. He’s dead. From this you are safe.
Ez grabs the chalk from Venice, gets on his knees, and begins to scribble all over the boat’s deck. The images he draws are the same ones I see in my mind.
“I killed Kronen,” I say.
“Yes, Pen. That was real. What you’ve seen here isn’t real.”
I don’t know how my little brother gets us all off of the demon ship full of the dead but I know it has something to do with our stories, pictures, and songs. All I remember next is being back in the pink house with tears from my unstolen eye wet on my face.
4
PEN’S DESTINY
WE GATHER IN THE LIVING ROOM and eat some canned minestrone soup Merk brought; no one is up to picking fresh vegetables tonight. My head hurts, like my brain is swollen, edema, pressing against my skull. Venice found another patch to cover my eye.
It’s Hex who speaks first, rubbing his temples; I guess he feels like I do. “What the hell was that?”
Merk focuses his eyes on my brother, who flinches a little. “Why didn’t it get you?”
“I have no idea.”
“There’s something special about that kid.” Merk slurps down some soup and scowls out the window. “He’ll be helpful when we go back out.”
Hex almost jumps out of his chair. “What the fuck are you talking about? We’re not going near that ship again. If anything, we’ll set fire to it.”
“How else will we get to the new world?” Merk replies, very calm. He wipes his nose on his filthy sleeve.
“That thing almost killed us,” Hex growls; he sounds like Argos. “You almost killed us with that gun. And the six of us couldn’t man that ship even if it wasn’t bewitched.”
Merk stands and goes to the window. He puts both hands on the glass, leaving greasy smudges. “The ghosts will sail us there,” he says.
He’s gone over the edge for sure this time.
“You need to rest,” I tell him. “Why don’t you lie down?”
Merk turns and saunters out of the room like an old-time cowboy. First a pirate, now this. He really missed his calling as an actor but it’s too late for that now. “Wait and see,” he says over his shoulder. “We will board that ship again and the ghosts will sail us to the new world. Pen will be the founder of a civilization. It is her destiny. The star spoke it. As her father, I must accompany her.”
I think about the shooting star we saw. Though I was too out of it at the time to realize, Merk interpreted the star as another omen. In The Aeneid it was a sign that Aeneas’s father Anchises should join Aeneas on his journey. Merk certainly sees the star as a reason to go.
I look over at Hex, wanting to touch him but I’m not sure if we’re okay. The venom with which he spoke to me on the ship still scares me, even if he thought I was his mother at the time.
“I thought Luther was there,” Ash says. Luther is the choral director Ash lived with when his mom threw him out for being gay. Luther the pedophile, the one Ash thought I was when we were under the ship’s spell. Why did they all think I was someone they hated? The question makes me cold from my skin to my insides, as if I’m still out in the wind.
“I thought I saw my mother.” I wonder if Hex is avoiding eye contact on purpose when he says this.
“Pen thought she saw Kronen,” says Venice. “And Merk thought it was sea snakes that wanted to kill him.”
Like the sea snakes in The Aeneid that killed the Trojan Laocoön and his two young sons, when Laocoön tried to convince them not to take the Trojan horse in through the gates. Once again there are parallels with the epic but none of it makes any real sense in this mad world.
Hex rolls his eyes. “Figures he’d be the one to see the snakes. He’s fucking insane even without a spell.”
“But Ez saw Eliot,” I say. “Not someone he hates, obviously. Why was that?”
“Why did he leave me?” Ez says under his breath. “Sometimes when I’m not thinking clearly I hate him for dying. He should be with us.” His eyes are still red. I go and put my arm around his shoulders; he feels thinner than usual.
“Well, we’re not going back out there,” says Venice. “We may have to burn it like Hex said.”
I’ve never heard my brother sound so assertive, as if the experience on the ship changed him, let him see that in some way he is stronger than all of us. Hex is looking at him differently, too. Not as a child but as a peer.
“I’m not going near it,” Ez says. “I told you to stay away from it and you didn’t listen.” His voice has risen in pitch and I see Hex’s eyes get bigger and his lips tighten like they’re on a drawstring.
“This is all bullshit,” he says. “I need to go meditate.”
I start to join him but something in his face tells me not to and I go to the window instead. I can see the wooden horse rear up on the prow of the ship as it moves in the water.
* * *
Hex seems to be avoiding me all night. When he finally comes to bed I feel an exhale of relief move through my whole body. But he turns his face to the wall. I ask him what’s wrong.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “Can we just not talk for once?”
I can’t not talk. And since when doesn’t Hex want to talk to me? “Why did you think I was your mother?” I say, in spite of myself.
He sits up in bed and glares at me. “Why do you think? I was fucked up. I might as well have been high.”
“Is that what this is about? You think you got high again? It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We didn’t know this would
happen.”
“That’s not the point. I don’t like being out of control.”
But Hex, I think, we’re always out of control. Look around you.
“Your mother was out of control,” I say instead. “But you’re not her. And neither am I.” Hex has told me that his mother would leave him alone all the time when he was little and that when she was home she was so drunk or high she hardly knew who he was. She had black hair and green eyes and pale skin like Hex’s; I saw a vision of her once, staggering around the house in a silk nightgown with a bottle of liquor, reciting Shakespeare. He hated her. I remember the way he looked at me on the ship, like he wanted to harm me. It’s hard to forget that look, even if he didn’t realize it was me.
“Just go to sleep,” he says, as if he still doesn’t know who I am.
* * *
We wake to a shaking and I think, This is it again, another Earth Shaker. Another one. It’s here.
The whole house is moving and then I hear Venice call out.
“Giant!”
It’s not just a nightmare. As I run downstairs I can see the Giant coming toward us through the window. He staggers blind, his hands out in front of him. He’s sniffing the air, like he’s tracking me, my scent, no one else’s. I’m the one who blinded him and killed his father.
My hair stands up on my head; my voice catches in my throat.
I don’t remember how my friends and my brother and dog and I get out of the house but somehow we are outside in the mournful gray dawn and Bull is still coming toward us. I grab Venice’s hand. He has Argos, and Hex and Ez and Ash are with us and we are running through the mud.
We are running toward the ship because there’s nowhere else to go, or at least that’s what the ship is telling us, calling us to it, beckoning us back. The horse on the prow rears out of the water, sea foam frothing from its mouth like the beast has gone mad.
Where’s Merk? I think but it’s too late and I’m at the ship and climbing the rocks, clambering over the side onto the deck.
Ghosts, Merk said.
I hear a shot and turn around and there’s Merk, running toward us, backwards, shooting his rifle at Bull but Bull keeps coming. How will we ever sail this ship? There’s no way—there are only six of us.
And then, before I can think anything else, the Giant, Bull, is at the shore, his hand reaching out, the warts bubbling up on his hand, the smell of his breath like rotten fish, like he’s swallowed a whole school of foul fish. And then the ship is sailing, as if on its own, away from our home and toward my unwanted destiny.
5
THE GHOST SHIP SAILS
THE SHIP IS MOVING through the water, manned by ghosts.
How else could it be moving? I am too dizzy and weak and confused and bewitched to question it. I’m staring at Merk who is standing in front of me with a gun in one hand and a length of rope coiled over his arm. I don’t know when he got the rope.
“Down you go, mateys,” he says. “I’ll tie you up and stow you below until we reach our destination. Can’t have you harming one another.” Since when is he a pirate? He grins and I see the missing teeth.
“Fuck off,” Hex says. “We’re not going anywhere. You’re not in charge.”
I hadn’t noticed that Hex was right behind me. I try to say something to him but I can’t.
“It’s for your own good,” Merk says to Hex. “Now come right over here like a good girl.”
Even in my confusion I know that’s not the thing to say to Hex, who is not what he once was. He lunges at Merk and Merk fires the gun and I scream, the fear tearing through my spell-induced muteness. Hex dives to the deck and Merk grabs him and wrestles him and I throw myself onto Merk.
Then there is a loud sharp sound and pain and then everything is dark.
* * *
When I open my eyes I am lying in darkness, tied up. The rope is abrading my wrists and blood is pounding in my skull. The boat is moving beneath me, the air is dank, and my stomach wobbles like a jellyfish. Once when walking on the beach, one stung me on my foot and the pain had the same gelatinous, veined quality as the creature that administered it.
“Hex!” I manage to say, after a long time, the muteness trying to strangle me again.
Someone is speaking to me but I can’t see who it is. “Pen, listen to me very carefully. We’re back on the ship. You’re under some kind of spell. Your father Merk is under it too. He tied us all up. I don’t know where Hex is, or Ash or Ez. Or Argos. I think Merk tied them up too. But I think everything is going to be okay. We just have to be patient.”
“Who are you?” I ask. “Are you a ghost?”
“I’m your brother, Venice.”
“I don’t know who you are,” I whisper. I think the ghost might want to harm me.
“I’ll tell you,” he says. “Don’t be afraid.”
When he finishes telling me the story about the family ripped apart by an earthquake, the ghost pauses as if trying to catch his breath. Or hold back a sob.
Is he a ghost? Ghosts don’t breathe. Ghosts don’t cry.
But whoever he is, my heart leaps toward the picture he’s painted in my brain—a three-story house the color of pink roses, full of food and music and love. I want to go there, that’s all I want.
“Just don’t be afraid, okay?” he tells me. “You are very brave.”
I don’t know what to say. I am afraid. I’m afraid of everything. When he says the word brave, he must not be talking about me.
“The spell only seems to work on the ship. When we reach land you’ll be yourself again.”
Reach land? What land? Even in this confused state I know I have to get back to the house he told me about. “I want to go home.”
“I know,” he says. “But I think there must be some reason why we have to go wherever this ship is taking us. Maybe someone needs help.”
I don’t know how to help anyone, not even myself. “Why aren’t you…” I try to ask but my tongue feels thick.
“Why aren’t I under the spell? I don’t know. It didn’t affect me.”
My stomach interrupts us with a loud growl. “Are you hungry?” the ghost asks.
I tell him that I am, and thirsty, too. My mouth feels like sand and salt.
“Merk will bring us food and water,” the ghost, my brother, promises. But I don’t know what I believe anymore.
And then I see the man who took my eye.
He’s standing above me wearing a black top hat and a long black coat that resembles charred skin. On his hands are thick black rubber gloves and on his feet are heavy boots with sharp spikes. His eyes are hidden behind dark oversize goggles. He takes out something from the pocket of his coat and fondles it in his gloved hand. Then he removes the goggles and smiles at me, his face stretching into a long, strange shape like a child’s Halloween mask. One eye is an empty hollow. Like mine. The man takes the thing from his pocket, holding it tenderly between his thumb and forefinger, and pushes it into the eye socket. It’s brown and smaller than his other eye and I know where he got it. It’s mine.
“Are you okay?” the ghost says. I’d forgotten he was there.
I can’t speak so I just point at the man.
“Do you see someone who scares you? A dark-haired man with a small beard?”
“Yes,” I manage.
“He’s dead,” the ghost promises me. “I’ll tell you a story, okay?”
“My eye,” I say.
“That’s Kronen. The Giant maker.”
The ghost pauses as if to gauge my reaction and then goes on in a soft voice. I try to listen to him but I’m still staring at Kronen who is doing a slow jig in his heavy boots, his face twisted into that grimacing smile.
“You killed him. You’re having a different kind of vision now, but it’s not real. It’s because we’re on the ship. It makes you see things that frighten you. Tell Kronen to leave you alone. You’ve already killed him.”
Kronen leans close to me so I can see my eye stuck in
his misshapen head.
“Tell him,” my ghost brother says.
I can’t.
“Tell him.”
“Venice?”
“Yes, I’m Venice. You can tell him.”
I see a tall gold building made of the skeletons of the dead. BANK OF THE APOCALYPSE, reads a sign. A man and a Giant stand before me. Kronen and Kutter. I’m holding a sword in my hand. Hex’s sword. He is gone but I’ll find him again. I will find him, and my other friends.
And the words come to me then. “I know of many things,” I say. “Gods and monsters, transformations, spells and enchantments, trees and oceans, hospitality, loyalty, betrayal, great wars. I know of kleos—glory—and I know of love.”
“You are Pen the storyteller,” says my brother, Venice, the ghost. “Your words are powerful. Your love is powerful.”
And with that Kronen fades away into the bowels of the ship.
6
MAELSTROM
I’M SAFE FROM THE MONSTER maker Kronen but I’m not safe from the monsters of thirst and hunger. My lips are ringed with sore, dry skin that gets more irritated when I probe it with my swollen tongue. The roof of my mouth is swollen, too, and it even hurts to blink my eyes. My stomach seethes.
Venice keeps talking to me in his soothing ghost voice but he sounds farther and farther away.
At last we hear footsteps and someone is here with us.
The man holds my head up and pours fresh water into my mouth, relieving the dirty thirst. I try not to let a single drop escape even though he’s pouring too fast and I have to keep swallowing hard. Then he feeds me some type of porridge with a spoon. I gulp it down as fast as he’ll give it to me.
“Good job, girl, we’ll be at our destination soon,” the man growls.
When he leaves, ghost boy tells me the man’s name is Merk and that he’s my father. But he can’t be. I remember my father. He was a tall, quiet man with gentle hands, not this frightening pirate who has tied us up in the hull of a haunted ship.
The Island of Excess Love Page 4