Alibi Island

by SLMN

  “I told you not to let this phone be touched by anyone else, cunt. So if it’s been cloned, then either you’ve lied to me or someone has been spying on you. Is it your dad? Your mom? Who the fuck is it?”

  “I don’t know! Honestly, I don’t! No one has touched the phone ever. It goes with me everywhere! It lives in a secret compartment in my bag that I put in there myself. I’ve never told anyone! I only use it to talk to you, or to meet my friends when I’m leaving the house to party. No one knows about the…”

  Lainey stopped, as the memory came flooding back.

  Too many drinks, too much dancing, a few tabs of ecstasy and getting Gary to come and pick her up and take her home. Too risky to use an Uber on her allowance credit card, so she always called Gary. Stupid, poor, ugly, dependable Gary. She knew he had the hots for her—how could he not the way she treated him like a doormat with wheels? But the only time the phone had been out of her hand or bag in the time she’d gotten it to set up Pippa’s secret Facebook Profile, was when she’d dropped it in the back of Gary’s scummy Camry. He’d brought it back to the front gate 20 minutes later. He’d made a song and dance about handing it to Lainey herself; he said because he didn’t want Sven to know she had a second phone. But now it also made sense, especially if Gary thought Sven might check it for malicious software before he handed it to Lainey.

  “Gary Malcolm. He had it for twenty minutes. I dropped it in his car, but Jake…or whoever you are…he couldn’t have done anything in that time, could he?”

  Jake-Not-Jake hit her again. This time Mustache let her fall as the third man just said, “Stupid cunt.”

  Jake-Not-Jake thumbed his cell and snickered at what he’d written. “This will fuck ‘Cloning Gary’ up. Fuck him all to hell!”

  Thirteen hours later, they made Gary write his own suicide note with shaking hands before they hung him from the beam in the underground parking lot next to the Buick.

  Once they had his name and cellphone number, he was easy enough to trace through their contacts. Gary had stupidly left his own phone on, desperately waiting for another clone dump from Lainey’s cell, as he’d wandered through the Houston suburb’s back streets. He dared not go home—hiding from the police and whoever had sent the threatening text that morning, not wishing to be found by anyone.

  Finding a boy who didn’t want to be found had been small potatoes, especially when they triangulated his cell signal and saw that he was wandering around a Home Depot trying to look incongruous and non-suspicious.

  Mustache had put a gun in the boy’s spine, and they’d walked out of the store leaving dots of pee from the bottoms of his trousers and socks from where his bladder had opened itself out of sheer terror.

  But that wasn’t the icing on the cake.

  Jake-Not-Jake’s eyes had widened with shock, when Gary called Pippa “Lainey.”

  “You shitting me?”

  They’d sat Lainey against a concrete column and told her to watch. She looked up, and nodded. “You are in so much fucking trouble you have no idea, whoever the fuck you are.”

  Jake-Not-Jake laughed, his uneven teeth yellow in the half-light of the underground parking lot. “You’re Huey Ralston’s daughter?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. “Hot damn. That’s justice of the poetic kind. Rosa is going to love my ass from here to the middle of next week.”

  Gary said, “Can I go now. Please?”

  Dragons hit him in the gut, and Gary went down onto his knees, vomiting messily. “No, you can’t.” Dragons said.

  Mustache pulled Jake-Not-Jake to one side and hissed into his ear. It was an attempt at a whisper, but if Lainey strained her ear above Gary’s sobbing, then she could hear the exchange. “Fuck man. Ralston’s daughter. Are we sure this is a good idea?”

  Jake-Not-Jake clapped the Mexican on the shoulder, “It’s perfect. Rosa will dig it. No problem. We’re made on this.”

  “I dunno man. It’s…”

  Jake-Not-Jake pulled the Mexican’s forehead in and kissed it. “Trust me bro. Trust me. This is gonna take it to another level. All we gotta do is get the cunt to the airfield, and we’ll be able to name our price.”

  Jake-Not-Jake ordered Gary to be brought to his feet and told Mustache to get a pen and notepad from the glove compartment of the Buick. When they were ready, they untaped Gary’s hands and made him write.

  What he wrote made Lainey sick to the very core. She couldn’t believe what Jake-Not-Jake was making Gary do. It was the cruelest thing she’d ever seen in her short life. Every time she moved her face away from Gary’s protracted sniffling and weeping, Mustache slapped her and made her look again.

  “This will be instructive,” he said to Lainey. “You’ll learn not to fuck with us. We don’t take no for an answer.”

  Jake-Not-Jake dictated. Lainey tried to concentrate on the voice of Jake coming out of the wrong mouth. Jake-Not-Jake’s voice was so much younger than the body it inhabited. It screwed her up, knowing that she’d fallen for it so completely that she’d been played so comprehensively. And that deception had not only led to her capture, but would soon lead to Gary’s death.

  When the note was finished, Jake-Not-Jake took Gary to a small wooden box beneath the noose and told him to stand on it.

  “What if…I refuse?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Jake-Not-Jake.

  “You’re gonna kill me anyway, so why should I help you make it look like suicide?”

  “Because if you don’t…”

  The third man came over to Lainey, pulled a Glock from a shoulder holster, thumbed off the safety, snapped the rack back to put a round in the barrel and put the gun against the girl’s temple.

  Gary’s eyes bulged.

  Jake-Not-Jake indicated to the box. “Get up and put the noose around your neck. All that stands between Lainey’s brains putting in an appearance, and her living to fuck another day is you doing the decent thing. You love her, don’t you? You really do?”

  “No…I…”

  “Don’t lie Gary. I’ve been through your phone.” Jake-Not-Jake leaned in, his lips almost against Gary’s ear. “I’ve read the poems.”

  Gary nodded.

  The air of defeat around his body was all-encompassing. He climbed onto the box and put the noose of nylon rope, liberated from the Buick’s trunk, around his neck.

  “Any last words?” Jake-Not-Jake said.

  Before Gary could say anything, Jake-Not-Jake kicked the box away from Gary’s feet and he dropped eight inches.

  “I hate last words,” Jake-Not-Jake said to Lainey directly. “I’m an impatient guy. I like to get to the good part.”

  Lainey was made to look, as Gary slowly strangled on the rope. His eyes bulging, his tongue poking out of his mouth on a billow of thick foam. His feet kicking, then trembling and then becoming still.

  That’s when Lainey fainted.

  9

  Bimala longed for the Pink City.

  She wanted the crush of bodies in the Tripolia Bazar, the growl of the Tuk Tuk rickshaws carrying tourists and their purchases, the street sellers with their trinkets, the waves of life running across the surface on the rivers of commerce.

  There on the island, there was an awful quiet. It was a quiet that crushed the spirit and hollowed the soul. In E-Wing, the girls were all in their first year on the island. It was where Rosa and Carla put the newest arrivals, and it was where the girls were broken in by guards then trained by Rosa’s three Madams. Their lives were planned for the bedroom and fetishistic skills they would be taught to please the men and the women who came to the island.

  Bimala had been told this on her first morning on the island, four months prior. She was told by Rosa’s deputy herself, Carla, who personally inspected the new arrivals, checking their bodies and their potential.

  Carla, the tall blond-haired Colombian—whose hair was the color of platinum, body was like cast bronze, and who walked with the air of a Queen—told Bimala that she w
as pretty enough and would do well for the Straights. Those were the men who valued the idea of a romantic, faux consensual, liaison with the girls they abused. Bimala at eighteen was forming into a striking young woman, and Carla marked her for the Exercise and Make-Up cohort.

  Carla had told her the training would begin immediately.

  Bimala didn’t know why she expected her training, in whatever form it would be, to take place in the classroom of a school. She hadn’t been prepared at all to be dragged onto a grubby mattress in a guard room of E-Wing and subjected to two hours of terror being passed from guard to guard.

  When they returned her to her bed, she ached in every part of her body; there was blood and there was internal pain. She hadn’t slept and cried into her pillow, not wishing to draw attention to herself—not wishing to comment when other guards came for the next newest girl to begin her education on the same mattress stained with Bimala’s blood.

  Bimala survived by thinking about her life in Jaipur, though not the life before that. She had nearly no memories of her earliest life; her real parents were killed in a car crash when she was two. She had a couple of dog-eared photographs of her mother and father plus the ghost impressions of long ago memories, but that was all. In actuality, she’d been raised by her Aunt Chaaya and her Uncle Bharat. They were childless and unhappy about that, with the shame and humiliation brought upon a barren family. So the death of Chaaya’s brother had been both a terrible tragedy, but also a blessing in disguise.

  Destroying one family and making another.

  Jaipur was a wonderful place for a young girl to grow, especially one born into Hinduism and readily willing to take on the beliefs, tenets, and rituals thereof. One of the first prayers she had learned as a young girl was the one used in the morning purification ritual. The prayer was part of a meditational ceremony to Govinda: the Cowherd, the Protector. The prayer “Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam.” became a constant in Bimala’s life on the island. The need to purify herself from the dirt and pain of the Owners and their guards meant the ritual and the words were soon a way for Bimala to take her mind off whatever was being done to her body and leave it to the men and their ministrations for as long as was needed. Repeating the words over and over again, the feeling of purity would return to her bones and wash across her skin.

  Bimala was pure, despite whatever they might do to her body for the purposes of her training.

  There was no provision made on the island for dietary needs for those who were already following a particular religion. In the dormitory were girls from Jewish families in London, Catholic families in Ireland, Muslims from the slums of Syria and Turkey, as well as Russian girls brought up in the Orthodox faith. There were also girls who came to the island too young to know what faith they were or how they should observe it.

  Everyone was served the same food, and they chose to eat it or not. Bimala wasn’t a strict vegetarian—there was no instruction in the Vedic texts that forced a Hindu to be one. But like many of her faith and like that of the people who had brought her up, she would avoid meat and eggs where she could—swapping her meat with girls who wanted more in exchange for extra vegetables. The guards didn’t seem to mind this internal market in food to bond the girls together. As Carla said to Bimala one day when she’d come to take a look at how her “flock” was coming on, “It’s not like you’re going to be here long enough for it to matter. When we think you’re ready for the permanent wings, then you’ll be moving on.”

  The rest of Bimala’s training consisted of instructional videos on the techniques of pleasure. Bimala pretended to watch, but really was away praying to Govinda, purifying her thoughts.

  The attacks from guards continued but with less frequency, and they didn’t seem to care if she was reciprocating their assaults. In the end she was able to completely disassociate herself from the present while the guards did to her the most terrible things; things beyond her imagination or comprehension. The fact that she had no idea what was happening to her could be even held up as an example of what people might consensually call pleasure. It seemed to be a poor imitation at best, and an annihilating travesty at worst.

  “Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam,” she whispered beneath her breath or in her mind. Eyes closed, or if they ordered her to open them—as they would more often than not—she would focus on a spot on the wall of the dirty little room which smelled of sweat and depression.

  She would focus on a blemish in the wall plaster that was almost the shape of the Ghost Lake of Ramgarh. The man-made lake itself had dried up before Bimala was born. But the picture she had of her parents, dog-eared and stained was taken there. Her parents had visited eight years before Bimala had been born when the lake had still been full—before the vagaries of local government had caused it to become poorly maintained and ultimately dried out. To Bimala, the lake was a real world spot where she knew her parents had visited. But the ghostliness of it, the absence—the water having gone years before—meant that no one again could have that memory of standing by the water to have their photograph taken. Bimala’s parents had become Ramgarh Ghosts, and that spot on the wall in the plaster—where the white skim had fallen away to expose the rough brickwork beneath—was a shape that pretty much mirrored the one of Lake Ramgarh. And it was that shape Bimala fixated on as the guards did their worst.

  She longed for the Pink City, and so she would travel to the Ghost Lake in her mind.

  On the evening of the fourth month of her captivity, Carla came for Bimala in the dormitory. Carla brought with her a golden sari covered in intricate stitching, silver threads, and printed with the patterns of a rising sun over deep water. It was the most beautiful garment Bimala had ever seen.

  “Put it on,” instructed Carla.

  Bimala did as she was told, wrapping the cool material around her body and over her slender shoulders where it hung like a heavy sash.

  Carla reached into the bag she carried and passed Bimala a pair of diamante and brocade covered slippers with red silk uppers and soft canvas soles. Bimala slipped them on her feet, and they fitted as if they’d been made for her.

  Bimala didn’t need to ask why she was being given these incredible clothes. She had seen similar rituals in the past four months, as girls were lavished with gifts, and taken away by Carla—never to return to the E-Wing dormitory.

  It was now Bimala’s time.

  “You have done well, Bimmy,” said Carla, running her fingers through Bimala’s hair smoothing down any strays that weren’t already tightly bound into the rope of black hair that hung in a braid over the nape of her neck. From there the braid curled over Bimala’s shoulder to hang like the end of the sari across her breast.

  “I didn’t think you’d be ready for months yet, but you have completed your training already, and the guards tell me that you have stopped screaming when they are with you. You’ve stopped crying when you come back to your bed. This is a good sign. Girls who respond like that stay alive on the island. Those are the girls we value, those are the girls who do as they’re told, and give us no trouble. Girls like that are worth a million Macy’s.”

  Bimala hadn’t known Macy, but the picture of her dead body had been hung as a warning in the E-Wing noticeboard. It was only captioned as “Macy.” No one needed to have it explained to them. What they should take from it was the fact that it was there.

  “You’re not going to end up like Macy are you?”

  Bimala was half here, half at the Ghost Lake saying her prayer in her mind. She shook her head.

  “Outstanding,” Carla said and led Bimala by the hand out of the dormitory.

  Bimala had not been outside the one story cinderblock E-Wing since she’d been brought to the island by the steamer. Nothing much had changed from what she could remember. Six containment wings around a central mansion, a helipad, a staff wing, and control towers. This was t
he service area of the island, and to get to it from the main gate, you would have to drive or walk past the timber-framed guest chalets.

  The evening was sultry and hot. Muggy with clouds as if the sky sweated into the atmosphere.

  Carla led Bimala toward the chalets.

  Bimala could see out of the compound toward what she knew to be The Enchanted Forest, and beyond it the mountain—black and craggy rising up above the mist. Beyond even that, the sea.

  The sun was setting, casting long shadows below the cloud layer which glutted the sky from horizon to horizon. The air had the same feeling Bimala had at the start of the monsoon season back in Jaipur, but the air wasn’t thick and hard like India.

  Her journey to the island had taken many hours. Two or three days in fact, even before reaching the jungle port where she had been chained into the hold of the steamer with three other girls. Bimala couldn’t be sure where in the world she was now, but all she did know was it was tropical and very hot.

  They passed three chalets, and came to a fourth set back from the cinder path. It was bigger than those around it: a two-story construction with a veranda on both levels, dark windows in the failing twilight and just a sliver of yellow light sliding through a screen covering the front door.

  Carla looked down on Bimala, pushing her chin up with her crooked index finger. Bimala concentrated on the Ghost Lake and the ritual of purification.

  Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam

  “Do as you’re told, and I’ll let you keep the slippers. If I hear back that you’ve gone beyond the call of duty then I’ll let you keep the sari.”

  Govindethi sada snanam Govindethi sada japam, Govindethi sada dhyanam, sada Govinda keerthanam

  “But if I hear things that I don’t want to hear, I’ll cut you open from throat to cunt and feed you to my dog.”