Montgomery sighed. “Then stay near. Don’t make any quick movements.”
We crept through the bamboo toward the village. The tops of huts slowly appeared through the trees, sagging and torn down. There was no hammering, no praying, no sound of people. The wind blew the smell of burnt wood into our faces.
Montgomery went first. He crept along the side of a wooden fence, his body on alert. I peered down the dusty streets. Empty.
“Where are they all?” I asked.
Montgomery didn’t answer, but I could tell from the tense set of his shoulders that he didn’t know either.
The farther we went, the bolder we became. The few footprints in the muddy pathways were old and dried out. Montgomery stuck his head inside one of the huts. Empty.
“They’ve all left,” he concluded.
“And gone where?” Edward asked.
Montgomery shrugged. “It’s a big island.” But his eyes weren’t so certain. The islanders had lost their humanity now. They could be anywhere: in the trees, in the grass, watching us like the animals they’d always been. He pointed at a stone building behind the main square. “There’s the church. Let’s get the boat.”
We hurried across the square. The village was a ghost town, though days before it had been teeming with half-crazed creatures who stank and growled and crawled on all fours. Where was the python-woman? Cymbeline? Caesar?
Montgomery ducked his head into every hut. After each one, his expression grew more troubled. But he said nothing.
The wooden cross had been torn from the front of the church. Montgomery brushed his fingers over the hollow spot where it had once stood and then led us around the side to a rough stone patio in the back. He froze. When Edward and I caught up to him, I understood why.
The shed was gone. Burned. If there was ever a boat, it was now nothing but ash.
“Oh no,” I said. “Not this. Not now.” My feet sank into the soft earth outside the church’s open door. Without a boat, we’d have to wait for the next cargo ship—in a year or more. We’d never survive that long. Just as I stumbled forward, my mind whirling, a spindly set of fingers appeared from within the church and closed over my arm.
I screamed. With brutish force the hand jerked me inside the church, where muted splashes of colored light lit the walls from the few unbroken stained-glass windowpanes. The sudden rush of blues and reds and yellows made me forget where I was until Edward hurried in behind me, crowbar raised like a bludgeon. Montgomery was just behind him.
“Don’t!” he cried. “It’s Caesar.”
My erratic heartbeat calmed. This hulking beast, now barrel-chested and hunched at the shoulders, with broken stumps on his skull, was a far cry from the regal antlered minister we had seen before. I barely recognized him. His horse lips gaped at the end of an elongated face. Even if he’d still had his tongue, I don’t think he could have spoken. He was too far regressed.
He let me go and crossed the floor on four shaky legs, his back feet bent and hardened like hooves. The church echoed with the sounds of his feet skittering across the ground. Montgomery crouched next to him, unafraid.
“Where has everyone gone?” he asked gently.
Caesar bobbed his head mechanically, the stumps of his former antlers scraping against the stone wall. His eyes were glassy.
“We need the boat,” Montgomery said. “Did they burn it?”
Caesar’s head snapped around, his eyes drifting to the burned shed outside. Then he started bobbing again, faster and faster, getting agitated. He jumped up, pawing around the room. His hardened, curled fingers rested on the lip of a bowl, which he flipped onto the ground. It shattered, spilling dirty water and shards of pottery all over the floor.
With his hoof, Caesar nudged a curved shard across the wet ground, next to a piece of singed wood. He moved the wood closer, then looked at Montgomery.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
Montgomery jumped up. “He’s telling us where the boat is.”
BY THE TIME WE made it to the coast, the midday sun had given us all a thick sheen of sweat. Montgomery led us to the murky edge of a mangrove forest. Thin, spindly trees grew from the swampy tidal waters like giant skeletons. The ground was spongy under my feet. Something clicked. I paused. Another click.
“It’s the trees,” Montgomery said. “They filter salt from the water. Makes the roots contract and expand.”
I hugged my arms. The clicking sound echoed through the ghostly trees, as though they were telling a story.