And Mumma was talking, wearily, as if she"d been going on a long time, and soothingly, which was like a beautiful guide-rope out of my sickness, which my brain was following hand over hand. It"s what they do to people, what they have to do, and all you can do about it is watch out who you go loving, right? Make sure it"s not someone who"ll rouse that killing-anger in you, if you"ve got that rage, if you"re like our Ik Then the bank came up high in front of us, topped with gra.s.s that was white in Mumma"s lamp"s light. Beyond it were all the eyes, and attached to the eyes the bodies, flat and black against bonfire or starry sky. They shuffled aside for us.
I knew we had to leave Ik behind, and I didn"t make a fuss, not now. I had done my fussing, all at once; I had blown myself to bits out on the tar, and now several monstrous things, several gaping mouths of truth, were rattling pieces of me around their teeth. I would be all right, if Mai stayed quiet, if Mumma kept murmuring, if both their hands held me as we pa.s.sed through this forest of people, these flitting firefly eyes.
They got me up the bank, Mumma and Auntie; I paused and they stumped up and then lifted me, and I walked up the impossible slope like a demon, horizontal for a moment and then stiffly over the top and into my Mumma, whose arms were ready. She couldn"t"ve carried me out on the tar. We"d both have sunk, with me grown so big now. But here on the hard ground she took me up, too big as I was for it. And, too big as I was, I held myself onto her, crossing my feet around her back, my arms behind her neck. And she carried me like j.a.ppity"s wife used to carry j.a.ppity"s idiot son, and I felt just like that boy, as if the thoughts that were all right for everyone else weren"t coming now, and never would come, to me. As if all I could do was watch, but not ever know anything, not ever understand. I pushed my face into Mumma"s warm neck; I sealed my eyes shut against her skin; I let her strong warm arms carry me away in the dark.
The People on the Island.
T. M. Wright.
T. M. Wright (1968) is an American horror writer whose first novel, Strange Seed (1978), was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. More than a dozen novels have appeared since, including The Playground (1982), Carlisle Street (1983), The Island (1988), The Place (1989), The School (1990), Boundaries (1990), The Last Vampire (1991), and Little Boy Lost (1992). Wright"s short fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone magazine and many others. His seventh novel, A Manhattan Ghost Story (1984), has had fourteen foreign editions. The disturbing and surreal "The People on the Island" (2005) is an unusual tale that at times evokes Shirley Jackson while placing its characters fully within the weird.
This winter morning, when we crossed over the dune, we saw a man lying face down in a shallow tide pool half a dozen yards from us. A gull waddled about agitatedly near him and squawked now and then.
"Oh G.o.d," Elizabeth said, and stopped walking, as I had. She put her hand to her mouth, said again, "Oh G.o.d," and added, after a moment, "Another."
I love such winter walks on the beach. Even before we came to the island, I found them bracing. I claimed to the skeptical that they made me "feel alive."
The man in the half-frozen tide pool wore a black suit, and his shoulder-length hair also was black, as were his shoes. He wore several playfully grotesque rings on his right hand. One was purple, another green.
Elizabeth asked, "Do you think he drowned?" She looked questioningly at me, then at the man, again.
I answered, "Who"s to say?"
She looked at me again and frowned a bit. "He would. If he could."
Over lunch, we discussed the morning. Our discovery of the black-suited man was, of course, at the forefront of our conversation.
"I"m sick of these people," Elizabeth said, and sipped her tea. She was having a chocolate scone with the tea, but had not yet touched it. "Where do they come from?"
"I think we should go and look at him, again," I said.
Elizabeth broke off a small piece of her scone and popped it delicately into her mouth. She is a very courteous woman. Very aware of etiquette. "Go and look at him again," she echoed as she chewed.
"Yes," I said. "But more closely this time."
She glanced sadly toward the window, which overlooks the water.
I said, "Perhaps we should even...turn him onto his back."
She looked at me, brow furrowed, as if she were troubled. She looks at me like that quite a lot lately.
"Perhaps we really should do that," I said. "Turn him onto his back. Look at his face. It"s possible we know him, Elizabeth."
"I don"t think so," she said. "We know none of these people."
"But you"re so wrong," I said. "We know them only too well. They"re simply what they are. They are organs, flesh, hair. And blood as thick as pudding. How can they be any more or less than that?"
"I don"t understand you," Elizabeth said. "I don"t think I ever have."
I nodded. "Maybe that"s for the good."
She shook her head. "You only think it is, George."
"And what of the woman in the parlor?"
Elizabeth sighed. "She"ll keep. Every one of these people will keep."
"Yes," I said. "It"s amazing, isn"t it?" I smiled a little. "They keep so d.a.m.ned well."
Elizabeth awoke screaming early the following morning. I took her hard into my arms, gave her kisses and whispered a.s.surances that "everything is all right," until at last she became calm, and she said, "How long is this going to continue, George? How long do we have to endure it?"
I shook my head and held her more tightly. "My love," I told her, "our needs and our dreams can be demons. I"ve learned that much, here, at least. But our demons will bring us so much, if we let them, if only we can hear and understand their song."
This house is small, comfortable and easy to clean, a plus when the wind is fierce, as it usually is, and the fine sand insinuates itself through every crack and crevice. Winters are the best time for that, and this winter has been no exception. Often, it seems as if the wind blows in four directions at once, and the house shivers, shrieks, and complains. But although the house is small, it"s quite st.u.r.dy, and I have never worried about being tossed into the elements late one evening, or of coming back from one of our winter walks to find the house not where I"d left it.
Elizabeth says she"s waiting impatiently for the first snowfall. She says it brightens the landscape, reflects sunlight (should we ever have it), masks the grotesque. I tell her there"s no reason to mask the grotesque; I tell her it can be beautiful. She merely shakes her head and scowls.
The black-haired man in the black suit was missing from the tide pool. I a.s.sumed several possibilities he had been carried off by the tide itself, carrion eaters had quickly dispatched his remains, others on the island had spirited him away. That last possibility is remote, however. As far as I"ve been able to ascertain, there are no others living on this island. I"ve circ.u.mnavigated it several times (quite time consuming), and, except for a few scrubby trees, and the poor excuse for a lawn I try to maintain around the house, there"s an almost complete lack of flora; animal life is restricted to a few gulls and herons (they seem confused, somehow, even a bit logy; I can"t imagine why), and an animal I"ve only heard, but have never seen. I believe it"s a stray dog.
The woman in the parlor in the other house is perched on an exercise bike. She has both hands tightly on the handlebars and both feet on the pedals. She"s wearing bright red nail polish, and she"s leaning forward slightly, in the position a bike rider would use. Her head is up a bit, her gaze forward, her eyes open halfway. They"re robin"s-egg blue. Her hair is blond, straight, long, and stunning. She"s wearing a gray, loose-fitting exercise suit with the words "Find Out For Yourself" emblazoned across the chest in green, art deco-style letters.
I believe her name is Jane. Elizabeth is skeptical about this: "It could be anything," she said. "It could be Barbara, or Helen, or Jacqueline."
"No," I said. "I believe it"s Jane."
Elizabeth gave me a puzzled look. "She doesn"t look like a Jane to me. Where do you get these ideas, anyway? Why a.s.sign names to these people at all?"
"Because it amuses me," I said. "They amuse me."
She scowled.
We went to visit Jane this afternoon. It has been three days since our last visit, and she was precisely as we had left her. The parlor was cold, as was the entire house, I a.s.sume, since it"s not heated, and there was even a little frost on the backs of Jane"s hands, on her forehead, and on her eyes. I gestured to indicate the frost, because I found it almost decorative.
"Look there," I said. "Look at the frost." I smiled.
"It"s sad," Elizabeth said.
"I don"t think so," I said. "I think it becomes her."
"Good Lord," Elizabeth whispered.
She doesn"t like to visit Jane. She likes visiting none of those who exist here. But she most dislikes visiting Jane because, she says, Jane looks angry. "It"s in her eyes," Elizabeth said. "And in the line of her mouth."
I agreed, and added, "But I can"t imagine that she would have any reason to be angry. She is, after all, beyond anger."
"And everything else, as well," Elizabeth said.
"My point exactly. Don"t you see? Isn"t it obvious?"
"Nothing"s obvious," Elizabeth snapped. "Nothing"s obvious!" she repeated. "And that"s the whole point, isn"t it?"
She"s right. That is the whole point. Nothing"s obvious. Is the wind actually fierce and cold? Is the landscape actually barren? Is there a stray dog loose somewhere on the island? And what is Jane doing on the exercise bike in the parlor of the other house? Who put her there? And why? And what of the others? Henry, Joanna, and the rest. They"re fascinating. Complexity to simplicity to eternity in one effortless outflow of breath. Past and soul, needs and l.u.s.ts and longing gone forever in a moment without oxygen. And perhaps their purpose is simply to be fascinating, grotesque, and predictable. Like chess pieces. Pets. Stories told around a campfire.
But there are some givens. My fingers actually do have ink on them from the leaky fountain pen I"m using. Elizabeth"s hair has indeed begun to turn gray since we"ve come here. And I"m positive this is winter, positive about the wind and the barrenness of the landscape. Positive that the grandfather"s clock in Jane"s parlor predictably strikes the hour and the quarter hour. Positive there"s a purpose to my presence on this island. Positive it is an island. That it sits in an ocean. That the ocean churns and throws whitecaps at sandy beaches which I"m positive are eroding rapidly. Positive no one walks these beaches except Elizabeth and I, a few logy herons and gulls, and a creature that barks hoa.r.s.ely at a distance. Positive this landscape has as much to do with heaven as it has to do with h.e.l.l.
The others in that other house may have once believed in their immortality, and so they have it now, in a way. Caught forever in the positions of life eating, taking a bath, arranging shoes, feeding an absent cat, making love, becoming old, drowning. I am not surprised that there are no ghosts on this island. The others in that other house, and on the island in various places, are stationery ghosts we may touch, if we wish. But Elizabeth says that the touch of death is miserable, that it stinks. I disagree, of course. I tell her that death is as necessary to us as a beating heart.
Elizabeth and I have stopped having s.e.x. She no longer parades around naked in front of me, nor I in front of her. It"s something we used to revel in, something we found exciting and necessary after a shower, or just before bed, or simply as an enticement. But we don"t do it, anymore, though I believe desperately that I want it for us both. We don"t know why we"ve abandoned our nakedness at least I don"t know why.
We don"t prepare meals for one another, either. Various pasta dishes were our favorite, and I had become something of a pastry chef. But we don"t prepare meals for one another, anymore. We hardly eat, anymore, and hardly ever together. We eat when we"re hungry, and I think that neither of us finds any pleasure in it, though we have all the food we need, and the little kitchen is delightful and well-equipped.
It strikes me that Elizabeth and I are necessarily together here, on this island and in this house, and necessarily drifting apart. She is drifting off to a world that"s more confusing, complex and gaudy in a Technicolor way than I like. And though I hate to do it, I think I have no choice but to let her go there.
"How do they arrive?" Elizabeth asked.
"By boat, I imagine," I answered.
She turned her head toward me, and, in the half-light, I could see her frown. Prior to coming here, her frowns were elegantly expressive of much more than I had come to expect from any frown; but here, they"re merely expressive of sadness and confusion. "You mean they pilot a boat to this island they get in a boat and, start the engine, and..."
"Of course that"s not what I mean," I answered, regretting my abruptness.
We were lying in bed, comforter and blanket pulled up to our necks. The air in the room was cold, good for sleeping. "I meant that they"re brought here."
"By who?"
I shrugged. "By elves," I said, and grinned.
She said nothing.
"Did you hear me?" I said.
"Large elves," she said. I tried, unsuccessfully, to hear a tone of amus.e.m.e.nt in her voice.
"Elves with grunt and grit and muscle," I said. What a fascinating and grotesque idea, I thought. Elves piloting boats filled with the dead. Elves unloading the dead on my island and arranging them in various positions of life. It was an idea I could embrace, and which made me warm.
"We would hear such elves," Elizabeth said. "We would hear their boats."
"Above that wind?" I asked.
She said nothing.
The others who"ve been put here do not argue or cajole or laugh or make meaningless conversation, though one might expect from looking at them that argument or cajoling, laughter or meaningless talk could well be their intention, had they any intentions left. But they are at the mercy of the wind"s intentions, now, the intentions of the winter, the intentions of those unseen who move them about, from place to place, and from att.i.tude to att.i.tude. I have never seen this being done, but I"m sure that it is done.
Jane is no longer perched on her exercise bike. I don"t know where she is; Elizabeth says she"s reluctant to look elsewhere in that big house in fear we"ll find still others in the att.i.tudes of life. We believe, however, that Jane is indeed in the house because we can see what appear to be drag marks in the thin layer of sand throughout the house"s first floor. The drag marks stop halfway up the flight of stairs that"s off the parlor, where the layer of sand ends. So we a.s.sume that Jane is on the second or third floor of the house. We have no idea why she"s been moved.
Tonight, the creature that barks hoa.r.s.ely, and which I a.s.sume, perhaps incorrectly, to be a dog, seemed closer than it has on previous nights.
I have never seen the sunrise, here. From time to time, on our walks, I see a diffuse patch of light through the overcast and I a.s.sume it"s the sun it can be nothing else. I"ve seen a sunset or two, but these are dull events which possess nothing of the brilliance of sunsets in other places. The sky does not turn to fire, the pale and fragile blue at the horizon does not become a delicate, short-lived rose. No pale and fragile blue exists here, only a horizon the color of lead, which, in its own way, is quite remarkable.
I went to the other house without Elizabeth and found Jane lying on her back in a four-poster bed on the house"s third floor. She was wearing her gray exercise outfit, and her hands were clasped over her stomach, legs straight. Her sneakers were on the floor beside the bed. Her socks had been put neatly into the sneakers.
One of the room"s tall, thin windows was open wide, so the room was very cold.
Jane"s faded blue eyes were open wide, too, as if someone had forced them open. Her look of anger seemed to have pa.s.sed. This confused me, and made me angry. It pa.s.sed quickly.
"Whose world is this?" Elizabeth asked.
"It"s not a world," I answered. "It"s an island."
"That"s the same thing as a world." She sounded petulant. It"s a tone I used to find amusing as if she had momentarily become a small girl; it reminded me of our first few years together, when we were young children, before we started noticing, in earnest, that we were different s.e.xes.
Her petulance, now, is merely annoying. Like her frown.
I think I would find even her laughter annoying, if she laughed anymore.
I wish she were someone else.
"What are we going to do with them?" Elizabeth asked.
I shrugged. "What can we do with them?" I shook my head a little. "I"m not even sure we"re supposed to do anything with them." I grinned. "We can arrange them," I said.
"Arrange them?" She seemed astonished by the idea.
"Sure. We can make them be...what we want them to be. We can make them smile. We can make them look attentive and interested."
"That"s pathetic, George. They"re not dolls. They"re not marionettes."
"What are they, then?"
We were on one of our walks, which have grown less and less frequent because there are so few areas on this island, now, that are unsullied by the others propped up in their various positions of life. I find it very disconcerting to come across one of them even those with whom I"m familiar; perhaps because they are, as well, so grotesquely unfamiliar as their positions change from day to day and week to week. I maintained to Elizabeth that the others should, at least, remain predictable. If they are in an att.i.tude of repose, then that is as they should remain. If they are in some other att.i.tude an att.i.tude of life, as I call it then that is as they should remain, as well. They have no choice.
Elizabeth had no idea what I was talking about. I think, at times, that she does not appreciate the situation we have here as much as I. I believe that she sees it as a burden.
Sometimes I wish that she were somewhere else.
We"ve spotted the black-haired man in the black suit, though at a short distance. He was seated in a high-backed wooden chair on a dune overlooking the ocean. He was facing away from us, though we knew it was the same man we"d discovered two weeks earlier. When we saw him, we both stopped walking and Elizabeth whispered an obscenity. We were perhaps 50 yards from the man and the brisk wind was blowing his black hair about.
"He"s watching," Elizabeth said, then added, "or waiting."
"How could he be watching anything? Or, for that matter, waiting for anything?" I asked.
"Why not?" she said. "Why couldn"t he, or any of them, be watching? And waiting?"
"They"ve nothing to watch, and nothing to wait for," I said.