This can't be real. I know this can't be real.
Two days ago I decided to leave town, for good. Too many people who couldn't be trusted knew where I lived. The way I figured it, you only get one life, so you'd better make it last as long as possible. If I had to wander the country, be homeless or join the circus, at least I'd be alive. There was nothing left for me back in that town, anyway- no friends, no family, no job. I might as well start over somewhere new, somewhere nobody knows me, and pray my problems don't follow me there.
I drove for as long as I could. There was no destination in mind, just west, like the old pioneers, except instead of fighting dysentery I only had to stop every few hundred miles for gas. I drove until I could barely keep my eyes open, and the first time I nodded off I picked out the cheapest motel I could find and checked in. A sickly girl with small teeth gave me a key and told me where to find ice, though she didn't sound too convinced of it herself. My head barely touched the pillow before I was asleep. Except here's the thing: I fell asleep in a motel bed, that much I know.
But I woke up on the island.
Sunlight danced on the leaves. It was a bright day, too bright for my eyes, as if they were adjusting to the light after walking out of a darkened theater, but it wouldn't go away no matter how long I waited. The sun was angry on my skin, and I felt about the light a way I never had before. It bothered me. Hurt me. Right away I suspected I was dreaming, but it all felt too real- the feel of the grass underfoot, the salty air that stung at my nostrils. Over to my left was the dock, with no boat as usual, and behind me the main research building and the guard's office. As I studied them, dumbfounded, I noticed they were in perfect condition. The guard's office especially was intact, no busted down door or damage of any kind.
And there were voices coming from inside.
Slowly I walked between the buildings to the side of the guard's office, giving distance to the windows, careful not to be seen, and pressed my ear to the wall. The voices were muted but familiar-sounding, and I struggled to make out the words.
A laugh, one I would know anywhere. It was Eric, the day guard. Eric, laughing. Eric, alive. Hearing him like that set something off inside me, and I took my ear from the wall and headed toward the door. I'd like to say it was relief at hearing him alive, or some heroic need to warn him about his coming death, but to be honest, more than anything, I felt angry. A rage boiled up in my center as I took step after step through the grass. But before I could reach the door it opened, and someone stepped out into the daylight, closing the door behind them.
Terri.
I'd gone over this scenario in my head a thousand times, what I would do if I could get my hands on her, this psycho, this black widow, how I would enjoy making her pay for what she'd done to me and so many other unsuspecting men. I never thought I'd actually get that chance, considering she'd died back in that cave, but these days, all things considered, that doesn't seem to change anything.
As I bore down on her I said her name. Terri, alive, Terri, smiling, she looked up at me, and I saw her eyes wash over with emotion- fear and pain and something else, something wrong- and she glanced back at the office to check that the door was closed before she spoke.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” I replied, my throat hoarse. She looked again at the door. As I advanced on her she didn't back down, didn't try to fight, she only stepped forward and said something I couldn't hear. In my mind all I wanted to do was grab her, to hit her, choke her, shake the life from her. But the moment I reached out, hands going for her, my eyes went dark.
Night. I stood on the dock listening to the ocean. It was an eternal sound that pulled at my gut, urging me to step off the wood and into the water. The coastline with its lights and sounds seemed the most foreign, most unnatural thing to me at that moment.
There were closer lights, too. The guard's office was lit up like a torch in the night for the moths to bump and spiral against, not just the outer, security lights but the ones inside the windows as well. But there was something more important I had noticed, not a light but a sound, out in the trees past the buildings: the sound of a man walking through the woods.
Quietly, trying not to give myself away, I left the dock behind and walked up the hill past the office, past the bright window where inside the computer clicked and hummed. I tracked the sound in the trees through the first clearing- my God, the rotting bodies were back, even the disappearing and reappearing woman- and halfway across the island, always keeping my distance in case my footsteps were too heavy. I felt clumsy in the dark, uncoordinated, and I didn't want to be heard by whoever it was I was trailing.
Based on the direction they were going, I had a pretty good idea who it was.
A few hundred yards from where the pretend detectives and I had searched for the elusive second cave entrance, I doubled my pace without care for the noise. I'd be damned if I lost the bastard now. Yet damned I apparently was, because as I came to where the entrance should have been, I found myself very much alone in the clearing, staring out at ivy and leaves soaked in dew. I didn't see much choice except to wait, so I dug myself in behind an elm and watched carefully for anything unusual, any sight or sound to go on.
It took less than five minutes. With no warning a patch of thick, thick ivy swung up from the ground less than twenty feet from where I crouched. The ivy was mounted to a buried door, the wood made up to look like dirt, the whole thing so dirty and ivy-tangled we'd missed it on every pass. Doctor Christianson rose up from the ground. He calmly climbed an unseen ladder then stepped up from the depths and onto the ground. He shut the door behind him and tossed something into the tall grass, stomping back into the woods. I waited until he was gone, then scrambled forward and checked what he'd thrown.
A mostly empty bottle of whiskey, the remains dribbling into the dirt. I left it and pushed my hands into the wet ivy, searched around until my fingers found a handle. The hidden door lifted so easily, and onced it was propped open on its rusted hinge I clambered down the hole beneath, feet slipping on the cold metal rungs of the ladder that led down into the ground.
The sea echoed against rock, and there was just enough light for me to stumble my way through the cave. It wasn't the moon, or a candle or a flashlight that guided me, but the blinking, cycling lights of machines working in the dark that drew me in. One or two had small monitors, but most of them were of an older style, with dials and diodes and paper-fed read-outs and a crowd of other things I've never seen outside of a black-and-white movie, and one of the screens showed a topographic line-map of land which could only be Twain Island, with small bulbs inserted in key points. One of them was lit up and buzzing, and if I had to guess I would put its location somewhere close to where Greg's body was. Greg, the guy with the arms.
As I got closer to the busy machines, one of them, the largest, clicked on as if responding to company, and a large, thick-glassed bulb at its top, one that reminded me of the lamp and lens at the top of a lighthouse, hummed to life. The filament inside glowed hot and then hotter and somewhere a paper feed began spitting out lengths. The glass was red and so was the light. The sight of it sucked me in even stronger than the ocean had not long before.
I reached out for it, reached for the expanding glow, walked toward the welcoming, luminescent red, and in the throbbing crimson light I could see there was something wrong with my hand near the thumb, something that didn't belong there, and as all became the dark warmth of red sun, I made out the faint patterns of black thread stitched into my skin.
I woke up in the morning, in my car, pulled over at a harsh angle on the side of road. Whether I'd stayed in a motel or not I couldn't say, but enough cash was missing from my wallet that I think I did. These days it's so hard to keep track of every, little thing. It's bad enough keeping track of where I am, let alone where I've been.
Back on the island, when I reached for Terri, she'd said something I couldn't hear. I've spent a lot of time since thinking about her lips, the way they moved, the words they formed. The three words she'd said. I think I know what they were now.
“You're not finished.”
The last few days before I left town, I'd started having blackouts, long periods of time I lost track of. My car wouldn't be where I'd parked it. Food would be gone from my refrigerator. Before I left, I made one, last stop. I drove to the employment agency who put me on that damn island in the first place. I wanted to question the prick who ran it. I needed to know if he was in on it, if he'd knowingly sent me and God knows how many others into the snake pit, or if he'd been as naive as I was. But when I got there all I found was the charred remains of a building. What was left of it was marked off with police tape.
Someone had burned it to the ground.
Submitted March 31, 2015 at 07:37AM by bloodstreamcity http://ift.tt/1NwQla1 nosleep
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