“So wait, girl. Pray, and watch. Even from incorrect procedures you might learn something. You sleep through their rituals now, but you’d be well served to observe them. Watch them confound themselves. It’ll tell you plenty.”
From the feet up, the creature began to dissolve itself, not so much collapsing as letting the ground absorb it. But before the last of the shoulders, neck, and head disappeared, it offered one final thought.
“You can help a thing who loves the world destroy it; or you can help a thing who hates it save it.”
And the creature was gone.
Nia was shocked, but what could she do? She couldn’t speak, couldn’t act. Couldn’t warn or advise. She could only wait and reflect.
Something had spoken to her, and something had heard her respond. The creature had even taken credit for her condition. Could it be believed, even if it could not be trusted? If nothing else, Nia came away from the encounter with a fresh feeling she’d all but forgotten.
This really happened. Something caused it. Something knows about it.
And it logically followed that there might be an end in sight after all.
Now, finally—after several years of immobility and a desperate kind of resignation—Nia had something to be afraid of.
It was hard, dragging her consciousness up from the basement where she’d stored it. It was hard, forcing herself to awaken all the way and watch, and listen.
It was terrible, when she was paying attention.
All the awful sensations came back; all the distracting, distressing touches of wind, water, and insects assaulting her stony skin. The sun was blinding and hot, and the shadows were soft and tickling when they brushed back and forth, creeping here and there along her body as the treetops swayed.
She had to strike a balance if she wanted to keep what was left of her sanity. If she withdrew too far, then she slept too much. If she strained too hard to stay alert, then the frustration made her want to scream, all the time, every second.
She tried to train her mind. Sleep some, wake some. Find a cycle.
At first she couldn’t find a good pattern; she missed the things she meant to catch. As she dragged herself up from the comfortable depths of sleep, she’d detect a whiff of smoke, or smell a hint of charred fur or flesh. Down below on the yard before her, there would be fresh spots of burned grass; among the walkway’s paving stones there would be pieces of wax, broken matches, or half a bloody footprint.
When she wasn’t watching, people came and went; small animals were killed and chants were called.
Until finally, she caught them.
It might only have been that their routine changed, and not that she had become more vigilant.
Night had dropped itself onto the island, smothering the sand like a blanket putting out a fire.
A man in black clothes touched Nia’s shoulders. One of his lean hands pressed against her arm while the other hand arranged something light and scratchy on her head.
If she’d been able to jump, she would’ve lurched when she realized how close his eyes were to hers. They stunned her with their immediacy, six inches from her own and staring hard, staring like he believed there was someone inside. And although it had surprised and unnerved her when the crudely shaped beast had spoken, this was somehow worse. It was one thing for a monster to know her nature; it was another thing for that thin-faced man to gaze at her as if he gathered the worst.
Another flicker of awareness flashed across his face and was gone, and he was gone, too—retreated back into the yard to join six other people who were similarly dressed.
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he didn’t know after all.
But she’d seen it, for a second. Not perfect knowledge, but an inkling of the truth. She couldn’t decide whether she should cling to it and hope for more, or recoil, because around the edges of the black-clad man’s concentration there was mania, too.
He lifted a hood off his back and draped it over his head. His companions did the same, and together they stood in a half circle, candles in their hands. The tiny orange lights painted their faces with wobbling warmth.
Nia looked closely. She stared as hard as she could, but she could scarcely tell them apart. The first man was quite tall; two others were fairly short and might have been women. The other three were of average and comparable builds. She was desperate to see their faces, but the hoods hung low and cast impenetrable shadows from their hair to their chins.
The air reeked with the pungent metal stink of blood. One of Nia’s feet felt damp; she was glad she couldn’t see it. But she could see what was left of something cat-sized and torn apart. In the center of the semicircle, a stripped rib cage reared up sharply out of the lawn. A long strand of vertebrae coiled at the edge of the fountain.
A tail, she thought. Skinned and cast aside. Who are these people?
The group fell into expectant silence.
One of the smaller figures broke it. “How much longer?” It was a woman’s voice, low with age and a bit of fatigue.
The man who had touched Nia responded. “Quiet. Not much longer. Every night we get closer.”
“So you say,” said a third person, a man with a voice a little higher than the woman’s. “How are we supposed to know? How do we tell?”
“We’re summoning a goddess, not looking for a letter in the post. She’s all-powerful. She’ll let us know. Anyway, it’s obvious the stone woman was a sign that we were on the right path.”
The older woman wasn’t convinced. “The stone woman arrived four years ago, and nothing new has happened since she got here.”
“That’s our fault,” he insisted.
“Your fault,” she argued.
“Fine, then. My fault. All the signs indicated that a harbinger had come, but it took me time to find her. I kept my eyes trained on the water and the beach; how was I to know she’d be brought here? How were any of us to know?”
“Just one more mystery,” the woman grumbled. “One more secret, added to the stack.”
“This isn’t your mother’s faith. There’s none of that ‘many are called, and few are chosen’ nonsense. Few are called, and no one fails to answer. She picks us and we obey.”
“Then she could leave us better instructions.”
The leader’s hood hid his annoyed expression, but she could hear the glare in his voice. “This isn’t the sort of knowledge you let just anyone get their hands on. A little secrecy is a little security.”
One of the shorter characters spoke up and turned out to be a man after all. “But it’s been so long.”
“For who? For us? For her? How long do you think four years is to a goddess? It’s probably not even a blink. Not even a breath.”
“But we’re no gods,” the woman said.
“Not yet.”
“If she waits much longer, we’ll never survive to accept her promise—and yes, I know that her idea of a long time and ours don’t perfectly match. But how can we claim her reward when she won’t acknowledge us?”
“She has acknowledged us.” The leader thrust a waving hand toward Nia. “This was her promise, don’t you get it? This was her sign that she remembers us, and she wants us to be faithful.”
“According to you,” a younger male complained. “I don’t guess the stone lady came with a note attached?”
“No. She didn’t come with a . . . note attached.” He was forcing himself to stay composed.
For the moment, Nia was terrifically glad that she could not move and could not speak, because that meant she could not laugh. Laughing would probably make the situation worse. Everyone in the circle knew that much, too, so no one made a peep.
“But it’s as clear as the Scriptures. Look at her. Born from the ocean like Venus, twisted in awe and terror. Transformed by the other side, as some punishment, no doubt.” An idea came to him. He leveled his voice and added as much menace to the rest as he dared. “She probably doubted. It’s the only crime to their kind—disbelief i
s disrespect, and disrespect earns death.” He glanced again at Nia’s eyes and again she felt that awful tingle of understanding and connection. “Or worse.”
New sounds could suddenly be heard over the courtyard walls. Words spoken casually, with no intent of hiding them, slipped across the lawn.
The leader swore, and the others looked back and forth at one another as if searching for directions.
“Put out the lights,” the leader hissed. “Put them out now.”
Flames were hastily extinguished and smoldering candles were whisked under robes.
But the conversation still came closer. It was idle and argumentative, and Nia thought she recognized one speaker as Sam, the clerk with the clipboard who had visited a few days previously.
A fragment floated close enough for all the quiet, hooded people to hear.
“I’m telling you, the place is deserted and no one has been bothering it!”
“You’re wrong!”
“I’m wrong?”
“Yes. And you don’t even seem to care.”
“Out!” the leader mouthed, and he put just enough air behind it to give the word some audible weight. “Out the back, through the arch. Now.”
Hoods came down and robes were wadded up, but without the candles, and since they were shaded from the moon by the towering trees, Nia couldn’t see any faces. She watched them gather themselves together and flee. One of them grabbed the rib cage with its dangling shreds of meat, and one kicked madly at a patch of earth that had caught a spark and tried to flare.
And last of all, the grim-faced leader dashed up to Nia.
He tore a brittle crown off her head, cast it into the pulpy remains of the vineyard, and fled.
A round bob of yellow light slid into the yard, followed by Sam, who was holding the lantern that cast it.
“Do you smell that?” he demanded, lifting the lantern and illuminating his own face and the face of the fireman who’d joined him once before.
“Smell what?”
Sam frowned and made an exasperated, exaggerated sigh. “Fire? You don’t smell it? Don’t you fight them for a living?”
“Shut up,” Dave said. “I smell it. Not like a bonfire or anything. Just a little bit of smoke.”
“With wax,” Sam added. “Candles. Someone blew out some candles over here, and they didn’t do it very long ago.”
He swung the lantern to brighten the corner where Nia sat, and he gave her a good, long look.
Dave rolled his eyes. “If you dragged me all the way out here just to get another look at the naked statue, I swear to God—”
It was Sam’s turn to snap. “Stop it. Look, there’s something on her.”
“Where?”
Sam stepped closer. “On her feet,” he said, as his own feet landed on something crunchy and slightly damp. He dropped the lantern to his knees. “Dave. Dave. Dave. Look at this. Dave.”
“I’m looking, I’m looking,” Dave said, starting to sound nervous rather than annoyed.
The men stood there, lantern lifted and eyes cast down to the grass. They’d found the tail. Someone must have kicked it away from the fountain in all the commotion of escaping, and it had turned up underneath Sam’s shoe.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
“It’s disgusting.”
“I can see that. What is it?”
“It looks like . . .” Dave wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t know, so he reached for logical answers. “It’s part of an animal, don’t you see?”
Sam was sweating more than the balmy night called for. He shoved at his glasses again and tugged at his shirt collar. “I see, I see. What kind of animal? And what part of it?”
Dave crouched down and beckoned for Sam to lower the light. He found a stick and used it to poke the strip of bone and muscle. “I can’t tell. Maybe it’s a snake,” he guessed. “It looks like it could be a snake, one with all the skin peeled off it.”
He stood up straight and took a deep breath. He brushed his hands against his knees, rubbing away some dirt and grass. Having come to a reasonable conclusion, he felt much better.
“A snake?” Sam was less certain, but he was also willing to leap at any plausible solution. “Do you think? I’ve never seen the inside of one. Those don’t look like ribs, though. They look like backbones.”
“Snakes have got backbones, don’t they?”
“I thought they were more, I don’t know, ribby in the middle.”
“Have you ever seen the inside of a snake?” Dave asked.
“No.”
Dave’s grin radiated smugness. “Well, then. What would you know, anyway? We catch them and kill them sometimes around the house, little black snakes and garter snakes. Once in a blue moon, something meaner. On the inside they just look like, I don’t know. Like that, more or less.”
“Sure,” Sam agreed, but he still backed away. “But look at all this blood. So you think something caught it and meant to eat it?”
“Probably an owl. Maybe a cat.”
The corner of Sam’s eye snagged on Nia again, her sharply outlined form crouching at the edge of the lantern’s glow. Happy to have an excuse to leave the nasty thing on the ground, he approached her, wiping his shoes on the grass as he went.
“Where you going? Come back here with the light.”
“You should’ve brought your own,” Sam said. He held the lantern aloft and let the watery rays pour down over Nia’s form. “Hey, if an animal killed that thing, then it probably wouldn’t take a moment to rub the bloody corpse all over this statue, would it?”
“Why?” Dave asked, tempering the question with reluctant caution.
“No reason.” Sam stood up straight and turned his back to Nia. He sniffed again at the last withering curls of candle smoke and shook his head. “Let’s go. I’ll write another report and see if anything comes of it.”
“I don’t know why you bother.”
Sam didn’t answer right away, and when he did, his reply was irritated, but not resigned. “I’m not sure either, sometimes. But we told this guy we’d check his house—”
“Not his house, yet.”
“You know what I mean. And I’m not going to tell him that the coast is clear and he ought to buy the place, not until . . .”
Dave followed him out of the yard. “Until when?”
“Until I know what’s going on,” he finished weakly. “Or until it stops going on, whichever comes first. None of it sits right.”
“You worry too much. We get paid either way.”
“I know. But that only means we’ve got no reason to lie. He buys the place, he doesn’t buy the place. We still get paid.”
“In my book,” Dave griped, “that means we should leave it the hell alone.”
“You and me, we’re working off two different books, then.”
Captiva Island
Bernice made an impatient little noise and braced her hands on the rail of the Gasparilla. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“I told you,” José said. “My old island. It’s not very far from here.”
She cocked her head to the right and frowned, but it wasn’t an unhappy frown. “It’s been a long time since you’ve been there, right?”
“True. But I imagine it’s right where I left it.”
“The treasure?”
“The island.” He smiled at her over his shoulder. He leaned against the wheel, and the small ship’s path curved out of the bay, slipping past the last of the party boats. “The treasure I cannot vouch for. It’s probably there, but there’s always the chance that someone has stumbled across it. Still. It would very much surprise me if it’s gone.”
On Bernice’s shoulder there was a wide smear of blood. It reached into her hair, where it plastered one shiny blond curl against her ear. “And you said there’s gold there?”
“Necklaces, rings, earrings. Not to mention the diamonds.”
“Why is all of it jewelry? Most of the bootleggers I’ve met p
referred cold, hard cash.”
“Bootleggers?”
“Kind of like a pirate. Like a land pirate. My stepfather was one—or anyway, he worked with some of them.”
“Ah.”
Open ocean sprawled before them, and the full expanse of a perfectly cloudless sky stretched above. He would hang close to the coast, but he loved the possibility of it all—the vast and black spread of water tipped with white where the moon grazed the waves.
He said, “Then times have changed. In my day, precious metal was heavy, and it was heavily taxed. The travelers we met were wearing their fortunes, because it cost them less to transport it that way.”
He was happier than he could ever remember being.
For the first time since he’d thrown his body overboard, tangled in chains and determined to die, he was truly delighted to find himself alive.
It almost made him change his mind. Seeing the Gulf, wild and whole—and glancing again at Bernice, beautiful and awful—for one rebellious moment he thought it might be worth making a break for it.
He could take to the open sea; he could dash for . . . for what?
Again he looked at Bernice, standing at the edge of the deck. She leaned over the side and gazed down into the water, and it looked like her eyes were on fire. Even in the dark they glittered.
He could take her with him . . . but to where?
There was no good reason to even finish the thought. When he was alive, he’d taken to the water as soon as he’d been able. For all his life he’d known the feel of a rolling deck under his feet, and for most of his afterlife, too, riding the water or waiting beneath it. If he cut himself, he wondered, would he bleed anything but brine?
His smile, nearly fixed from cheek to cheek, spread another fraction. A good breeze lifted and pushed at the sails, and again, he thought his chest might implode with pleasure.
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