Terminal Island

Chapter Sixteen

ESCAPE FROM DEVIL’S ISLAND



Every day now was stretched and convoluted beyond the limits of patience, a tortuous folding and refolding of time like the twirling Mobius strip of saltwater taffy in the candy store window.

There were no more grotesque pranks like the pig’s head, but twice every day, before and after school, Henry could hear the catcalls of passing kids on bikes. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, and was grateful that the apartment was set so far back from the street, the kids not daring to venture down their garden path.

Whether his mother noticed, Henry wasn’t sure, but if she did, she didn’t let on. More likely, he thought, she just glossed over the sounds as innocent child’s play, cheers not jeers. In any case, she continued to come and go as if everything was hunky-dory, and didn’t report anything bad from her jaunts into town. Henry himself had not been farther outside than the porch since the day of the school incident. He lived in his pajamas and blue bathrobe, as resigned to the four walls as any prison inmate.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Oh, disintegrating nicely.” This was an expression his mother used in her darker moods, and it never failed to annoy him.

She didn’t smile. “Henry, you can’t just stay cooped up like this all the time. It’s not good for you.”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you sure? Wouldn’t you like to come with me to the store? Just for a little fresh air?”

“No. I’m fine, don’t worry about me.”

“I have to worry; I’m your mother.”

Then get us out of here, Henry thought.

But neither of them made any mention of that subject, which lay between them like a slumbering lion—better to leave be than to provoke it. Given time, perhaps it would just go away on its own.

His mother broke the stalemate on Friday night.

Sitting Henry down, her brown eyes sad and searching, she asked, “Are you sure about this, sweetie?”

Henry thought she looked a thousand years old. He said, “Yeah.”

“Because there’s no turning back. You can’t change your mind later.”

“I know.”

She nodded gravely, turning her face away to wipe a tear. “All right,” she said.

Henry pricked up. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“First thing in the morning. Pack your things.”

He hugged her, sobbing into her shoulder, his face squeezed into a grimace of pain and joy. Voice muffled, he said, “Thanks, Mom.”

She patted his arm, her face still turned away. “That’s okay, sweetie. That’s okay.”



* * *



They left the apartment at dawn. It was cold and drizzly out. The praying mantis was still in the exact same position Henry had last seen it, perched among the leaves. While his mother locked the door and put the key in the mailbox, Henry looked closely at the insect, then tried touching it. It fell to the ground, stiff and dead.

They walked down the path, burdened with their luggage. Henry was disconcerted to see a week’s worth of splattered eggs and other garbage littering their outer walkway. His mother hadn’t said a thing to him about this, nor did she mention it now, briskly stepping over the debris.

Turning left onto the sidewalk, Henry took a last look back at the cottage before they were past and out of sight. All he felt was relief.

The streets were deserted, the whole town shuttered, and as Henry and Vicki made their way down to the waterfront, she had to tell him several times to slow down—he was almost running. Henry didn’t want to explain why he was going so much faster than necessary—it would have meant admitting to himself that he was terrified of being seen. All he wanted was to sneak away like a thief, and be gone before anyone knew they had left.

They turned right at the waterfront, entering the tourist district, and followed the deserted brick promenade past boarded-up shops. Henry was startled to see how completely the town had emptied out since he went into hiding—there were not even any boats in the harbor. The sea was gray and covered with whitecaps.

Whereas before the place had been quaint and sleepy, winter had driven it far over the line into bleak. It felt like he and his mother were the last two people on the island.

They passed the closed taffy factory and crossed the main intersection. With a shock of fear, Henry saw two girls watching them from the other side of the street.

One was Lisa.

To his mother the girls probably seemed harmless enough in their boots and short skirts and candy-colored plastic raincoats, but to Henry they were mocking specters of pure dread. He edged closer beside his mom, eyes forward.

As they passed under the gloating stares of the girls, Henry felt an unexpected euphoria: This was the worst they could do to him outside of school. A dirty look, so what? With his mother beside him he was safe. He was free. He was leaving, and there was nothing they could do about it except stand there and watch him go.

Henry had a sudden wild urge to make a rude gesture of some kind, to stick his tongue out at them, or put his thumbs in his ears and waggle his fingers and go, Nyah-nyah-nyah! But he contented himself with meeting Lisa’s mocking eyes for one split second—all that he could stand. Just long enough to send a message of careless scorn for her and her whole miserable existence: You want this island to yourself? You can have it!

Continuing on, Henry saw two more girls around the next corner. His hair stood up. They were also familiar to him from the school—one of them was named Sylvia. When he looked back, he could see that the first pair was following at a discreet distance, and several more girls were converging with them from the side streets. They were all moving slowly and without apparent evil intent, swinging closed umbrellas as if out for a morning stroll. Now three more girls came into sight from behind the pier, pastel orange and pink against the leaden drizzle. At this point there were at least ten altogether.

Henry wondered how his mother could fail to notice them, but she seemed preoccupied with her heavy bags, focused on getting to the ferry terminal. Henry decided to do the same, to ignore the girls. They were just trying to scare him—what did they think they were going to do with his mother there, in broad daylight?

This was just some kind of farewell stunt for them to amuse themselves in their marooned boredom. Something to cackle over and dredge up when entertainment was scarce, to keep from turning on each other like so many hyenas. A last psych-out, nothing more. But that didn’t stop his pulse racing.

How had they known when he was leaving? For that matter, Henry wondered how they ever found out where he lived in the first place. He thought of one of his mother’s favorite expressions: The walls have ears. Another reason he was glad to be getting away from here.

The sidewalk continued past the pier to the south end of town, where the buildings were pinched between sea and cliffs. Here there was nowhere to lurk, and to Henry’s relief Lisa and her cronies remained behind, not daring to be quite so conspicuous.

He and his mother were almost there now, hoofing their bags alongside deserted volleyball courts and the bike rental shack. The ferry dock was just ahead, on the south cape—the Cabrillo Mole. Beyond that the road continued on beneath overarching cliffs, past Lover’s Cove and then out of sight around the point to the seaplane landing.

Henry was glad they wouldn’t be lugging their things that far, and wasn’t even sad about not taking the plane back—the ignominy of the cheaper ferry boat was fine by him. All his starry-eyed fantasies had turned dry and brown as the scrub on those hills; all he cared about now was getting out.

The ticket office was still closed, not a person in sight.

“Looks like we’re first in line,” said his mom breathlessly, shedding luggage. “We’re early.”

They settled down to wait, taking in the panorama of land and sea. From the raised terminal platform there was a perfect view of Avalon and the Casino across the mouth of the bay. It wasn’t raining on the island, but they could see filmy curtains of it trailing far out over the ocean, and tiny gold motes wheeling high up in shafts of breaking sunlight—seagulls. Not for the first time, but probably for the last, they wished they had a camera. Henry could almost pretend to be wistful.

After a few minutes, his mother said, “Oof, I have to go to the bathroom.” She checked the terminal restroom and found it locked. “Gee whiz. Henry, could you keep an eye on our things while I run into town for a second? I really have to go.”

Alarmed, Henry said, “Can’t you wait until the boat comes?”

“I really can’t. All that walking loosened me up—I have to run. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Where do you think you’re gonna go? Everything’s closed.”

Over her shoulder, she said, “The public toilets on the pier.” She was right: the beach restrooms were always open—they didn’t even have doors.

“Hurry back,” Henry called anxiously, watching her hustle down the path. She tossed him a perfunctory wave and was gone.

He shuffled around, hands in his pockets, humming tunelessly as he scanned the seas for their ship. It should be appearing any time now. From nervousness or the power of suggestion, he began to feel that he also had to go to the bathroom.

Fidgeting a few minutes more, pacing around in front of the ticket window, Henry decided he had to at least look for a place to pee before other travelers started showing up and he lost his chance.

The ferry landing was a wide, paved platform jutting out over the ocean, exposed on all sides. Since there was no one in sight, Henry thought of relieving himself right there in broad daylight, but he was too self-conscious for that—what if someone he couldn’t see was watching from town, or from those mansions on the hills? It wasn’t so farfetched; there were even coin-operated telescopes over by the Casino.

He circled the ticket kiosk. At the rear of the landing was a deck of slippery steel grates, below which the sloshing of waves could be heard and dimly seen, spooky as a subterranean lake. Standing there, Henry was more or less hidden, shielded by the terminal building, and with the added novelty of peeing directly into the sea. He was facing the direction of Lover’s Cove, but there was no one there. The only thing was he didn’t like being out of sight of the luggage—it would have to be quick.

He had just opened his fly and started to go when he sensed movement in his periphery: a blob of bright color. His pee stream cut off like a snipped string and he stuffed himself back in his pants, jerking his head around to see.

But he already knew—some part of him had been expecting it.

It was them. All of them, forming a semicircle around him, with Lisa at the center. Henry was surrounded by lollipop-colored girls, with no way to escape except over the edge of the landing: a twenty-foot drop to the sea, into water that was deep and clear and freezing cold. He could see Garibaldi perch like bright orange flames in the depths.

In the face of having his worst nightmare realized, Henry was unexpectedly devoid of terror. Years later he would wonder if it was the primordial survival reflex of the cornered animal, something deep in the organism realizing it was too late for fear, too far gone for flight. Or perhaps he was simply relieved to face the demons that had haunted him all these days and nights. The weariness of it. Whatever, he was suddenly almost amused; a fascinated bystander at his own execution.

“Now wait a second,” he said, instinctively holding up his hands as he had seen cops do on television when they were trying to calm desperate criminals. For this was as unreal as anything on TV—more so. “Stop playing around. This has gone far enough. You’re gonna get in trouble. I mean it.” His voice sounded high and brittle, foil-thin.

The girls weren’t hearing him. As at the playground, they stared at Henry with the erotic malevolence of carnivores, practically licking their lips. Their shiny plastic raincoats crackled as they moved. And now Henry noticed there was something odd about the way they were holding their closed umbrellas, gripping them two-handed as if they were baseball bats. Even odder were the umbrellas themselves: As Henry watched in disbelief, the girls gloatingly peeled off their colorful fabric sheaths to reveal sharp little swords.

Advancing on him, Lisa said, “Dibs on his heart.”

Henry jumped off the wharf.

There was a brief instant of heart-in-mouth falling, then he plunged deep into salty icewater. It went up his nose, flooded all his senses and his clothes, and Henry clawed his way back to the surface like a man trying to escape from a grave in which he has been buried alive.

He came up in shadow, in the darkness beneath the landing. It was loud under there with the slopping of waves, and rough—he was being lifted and dunked and dragged back and forth. Trying to get a breath, he inhaled water and was banged hard against a barnacled concrete piling—only his clothes saved him from being too badly gashed. He knew that if he didn’t get out of there, he would soon be ground to a pulp against the pilings or the rocks. There were also the threats he couldn’t see: snarls of lost fishing-line and rusty hooks, venomous black sea-urchins, moray eels, and God knew what else lurking in the abyss below his flailing legs. Sharks.

Above him, Henry caught watery-eyed glimpses of the girls atop the metal grating—some on hands and knees, peering down. Snippets of their shrill babble filtered through to him: “Keep looking!” “I am!” He could see them silhouetted against the sky, but he knew from standing up there that it was much harder for them to see him. As long as he didn’t reveal himself or make a sound, they might give up and go away. But if he stayed under there much longer he would be dead—the first really big wave would smash him like a bug.

It was so cold he could barely think, but Henry decided his only chance was to stay out of sight and work his way to the shallows. If he couldn’t stand up soon he was going to drown in his heavy clothes. He knew that there was a boat ramp close inshore, a concrete slope back up to the landing, slick with green algae—he could only hope the girls would be gone by the time he reached it. The waves were pushing him that way anyway; there wasn’t much he could do. Henry let himself be carried, drifting feet-first to fend off any obstacles, never so grateful to be wearing shoes.

For a while he wasn’t sure he was going to make it. A number of times waves picked him up and hurled him into the pilings and jumbled boulders that made up the foundation of the landing, then painfully dragged him off again. It was a gauntlet of rough and slippery impacts. While in this deeply-shadowed grotto, he also ran into softer masses: sea anemones and sponges like limply-caressing hands, rubbery vines and flaps of kelp that threatened to entangle him…and something else.

What happened next is only recalled in Henry’s worst nightmares:



Swimming in the webbed green half-light of an undersea grotto, feet dragging over rocks, with tendrils of slimy brown kelp pulling you down and freezing saltwater sloshing over your head, you try to stay afloat. The back wall rises before you—the base of the ferry terminal. Veins of wiggly luminescence play across the underside of its bellied surface, an artificially sculpted surface: Weird, fleshy folds cut in wet rock that seem to heave and shift in the submarine twilight.

Eyes. Immense bulging eyes laughing malevolently out of a giant stone face half-submerged in the sea. It is at least twenty feet wide, crudely chopped out of native bedrock and faced with a living, scuttling mosaic of black and red and green rock crabs, seething like lice in the furrows.

The uneven, rough-hewn quality of the sculpture gives it the freakishness of a portrait drawn by a schizophrenic. It looks alive—the face’s grotesque expression of maniacal, devouring glee exerts a power that stops the heart, shuts down the mind, robs the body of any residual warmth. It roars—a thick, vomitous gurgle emanating from its hugely laughing/screaming mouth as water covers and uncovers it, that gulping maw seeming to want to suck you in.

Unwillingly driven into that bellowing orifice, you come up against a barrier of thickly-rusted iron bars and hang on for dear life as wave-surge swamps your head and sluggishly retreats.

A hand slinks through the bars, long fingers clamping around the back of your neck. Pinning you in place. “Did you draw the short straw, sonnyboy?” rasps a voice from within that dark, gated crevice. “Did you lay bets on whether I was dead?”

Chin-deep in swirling foam, your face is pressed tight against the bars, staring eye to eye with a vision of horror more incredible than anything in your wildest dreams: a bleach-faced living corpse, gelatinous skin sloughing off like wet tissue-paper, nose a purplish crater, salt-crusted hair coming out in clumps. It stinks like rotting fish—you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Only its shining eyes seem fully alive, red-rimmed and bloodshot and bugging out of its head with wild intensity.

“Stay with me, now,” its reeking, toothless open sore of a mouth beseeches. “If you stay with me I can keep you warm, snuggling in my heart of stone, on a bed of soft moss! Eternal night of glory! Learn the gift of holy prophesy as it was taught to me, and to the unbroken line of all who came before! Do it! There is no choice! If you deny this honor—death! A plague upon you and all you love! Stay with meeee—”

The water covers you up again, and the rush of air escaping from the cave gives you a bare advantage over that clutching horror. You kick away, breaking free and not stopping until you are on dry land. By then you barely remember what you saw down there—all that is left is the fading aura of dread after waking from a fever.



His mind blank, Henry was suddenly fleeing, thrashing for his life away from something so fearful it shook him out of his exhaustion and cold and growing acquiescence to just let go, to give in and sink. So horrible that he screamed and screamed, unable to stop though it gave him away and opened his throat to the waves, the screaming broken only by croaks of regurgitated seawater.

The next thing Henry clearly remembered was hearing a familiar sound, so loud and powerful that it penetrated even this place and broke through his terror:

BWAAAAAAAAAAA!

It was the horn of the ferryboat.

Careless of the girls—the girls all but forgotten—Henry dragged himself the last of the way in a blind rush, emerging back in daylight and slogging up the slippery ramp to the platform, using starfish as handholds. Lisa and her minions were nowhere to be seen.

He found his mother in fevered consultation with the ticket authorities, who were on the phone to the police. As soon as they saw him coming around the corner, they apologized and hung up, tapping her and saying, “Is that him?” indicating Henry’s pitiful, bedraggled form. Vicki cried out at the sight of him.

“Henry! Where have you been, oh my God! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said dully.

“You had me so worried!” She clutched him tightly, weeping with relief. “I came back and couldn’t find you! Where were you? What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh my God, did you fall in the water or something? Why are you all wet?”

“I fell in the water. It was an accident.”

“Oh no! Oh, honey! Are you all right?”

Henry nodded sluggishly. Looking the gleaming white ferryboat, he asked, “Is it time to go?”

“Are you all right? You’re hurt! Shouldn’t we take you to the doctor?”

“No, I want to just go.”

“Are you sure? Oh, honey, I was so scared…”

“Yes, let’s go.” It required an extreme effort to focus, to crawl out of the depths of his shock and meet her frantic eyes. “Let’s go now, Mom.”

“But you—”

“I want to go now. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

They boarded the boat.





PART II:

ANGEL’S TRUMPET