CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dex was filming with the Super 8, spanning it across the empty campsite by the time I came staggering in. I was growing fainter with each step I took; the corners of my eyes were sprinkled by tiny spots, my legs were feeling like jelly and barely able to hold my body upright. I knew tears were streaming down my face in dirty streams and my communication was whittled down to animalistic sobs as I tried to link my hands to hold the profuse bleeding that spewed from my wrists.
Dex turned and brought the camera’s focus on me. Then it fell out of his hands and clanked to his feet. His mouth dropped in abhorrence at the sight of me.
“Oh, Perry,” he cried out softly, bringing his hands up to his face. I stumbled up to him and crashed against his chest. He grabbed me and held me up. I was shaking like a leaf and now he was too. I sobbed into him for a few minutes, knowing I was getting blood all over his front, unable to express a single thought or feeling except the seemingly limitless surge of dread that pushed through my every crevice.
He pushed me back a bit and eyed my wrists strangely. “What did you do?”
I shook my head. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. But everything came out in sobs.
He quickly sat me down on the picnic table and disappeared into the tent. He came out with a t–shirt of his and began ripping it in half and then into long strips of cloth.
I continued to cry but managed to slow my heart rate and breathing down enough so that the dots in my vision started to fade, and the possibility of fainting grew less and less.
“Why did you do this?” he asked. His voice was soft but the accusation was menacing. How could he think I did this to myself? Couldn’t he see what was happening?
“No,” I managed to mumble out through spit. “It wasn’t me. It was the bushes. The rose bushes.”
He shook his head angrily. I sounded like a loon.
“Really!” I cried. “It was the bushes. It was Mary–”
“There is no Mary!” he screamed at me, a vein sticking out on his wrought forehead. His ferocity sucked the tears back into my face.
“Dex,” I began, feeling the shakes coming over me again. Tremors of frustration, shivers of fear.
“You’re crazy, you know that? You’ve lost it,” he said, taking one of my forearms in his hand and wrapping the cloth around my wrist as tightly as possible.
Indignation sparked inside of my chest, threatening to come up in a furious pile of word vomit.
“I’m not crazy,” I said as steadily as I could, looking him in the eye, begging for him to see the truth. “Mary is real. She was up by her rose garden, she–”
He raised his hand briefly. “I don’t want to hear it anymore. What you’re doing now, Perry, is you’re hurting me as well as yourself. You’re 23-years old now. You’re too old to do this kind of shit anymore. You need to…you need to just stop. And think. I don’t know if this is a cry for help or what the fuck, but whatever it is, you need to stop it right now and think about me. This isn’t fair.”
Now it was my time for my jaw to drop. “I swear. I didn’t do this to myself,” my voice choked with disbelief at what I was hearing.
He tightened the cloth around my wrist and fastened it with a bunch of tiny knots. “You need help, Perry. More help than I can give right now. You aren’t well.”
That did it. Word vomit was coming up.
“You,” I sneered, “you’re the one who needs help. You were in a fucking mental institution! When the fuck were you going to fill me in on that, huh?”
He looked like I had just struck him across the face with a plank of wood. His face lost all color, his eyes sank into his head like frightened shadows. I had hit his soft spot. Mary was right after all.
“How did you know that?” he breathed in a heavy spasm.
“I’d tell you but you’d just call me crazy. Funny how all this time you’re the one I should be worried about. Acting all high and mighty while you’re the fucking nutcase.” I spat the words out at him, hoping they’d inflict the same damage that the roses had done to me.
His jaw clenched but he didn’t say anything. I think he was speechless. Good. Because I wasn’t done.
“Oh, poor Perry, let’s look out for her; oh she must have been such a pain to her parents with all these shrinks and panic attacks and teenage hi–jinks. Poor little Perry, with her mental problems and her seeing things. Let’s ignore Dex, the real problem here. Yeah, he makes light about having some fucking bipolar thing, but that’s it, he takes pills here and there, it’s no big deal. Sure he might be a bit of asshole and a fucking weirdo but it’s not like he was ever institutionalized. Oh wait, yes he was. And no, of course he wasn’t going to tell poor little Perry about it; how dare his partner think for one minute she might be his equal or even better than him!”
I was yelling now, on my feet and in his stony face, venom flying everywhere.
“What did it, huh? What made them put you away, huh? Oh, your ex–girlfriend dies in a drunk driving accident. Was that it? Was that enough, you felt like wallowing in your pain and feeling sorry for yourself, Declan Foray, so adept at being a martyr, a composer of nothing but self–pity. Or was it something else? Daddy issues maybe? Your daddy leaves you when you’re young and you think the event is so special, so tragic and unique to you, never mind the fact that everyone has fucking family problem problems. And now, 32-years later you can’t get over the lack of daddy love. Or maybe it’s that your mom died. Is that what did it? Fuck, now that you have a baby on the way, they better start making room for you in your padded cell again!”
I had gone too far. I knew it. I was panting from the viciousness of my words, watching his face sink, his breath sucked in one sharp inhale.
First hurt appeared in his brow, like I had slapped him with it, but he nursed it for a split second before his eyes turned into the most vile orbs of pure hatred I had ever seen. He loathed me. He was pure viper. And so was I.
“Fuck. You,” he said through clenched teeth.
He took the remaining cloth, rolled it up into an angry ball and threw it far into the forest. “You can look after your fucking self. I’m done.”
He picked up the camera from the ground, shoved it into backpack, and strode off into the forest.
I was alone. My one wrist continued to bleed, though it was slowing down a bit. I struggled to catch my breath and watched the beads of blood roll back and forth, depending on what way I turned my arm. A lot of the blood was starting to clot in sticky black balls.
I don’t know how long I stared at my wrist and my arm. It was much easier to think about that than it was to think about what had just happened. What I had just said. I had just ripped Dex’s heart and pride out of his body and stomped on it. It felt shamefully good at the time, the way the words just flew out of me like volcanic fire, wanting nothing more than to burn him with them, burn him slowly, so he could feel all of it.
Now I just felt ashamed. I had hurt the man I loved in the most poignant way possible. There was no way we could recover from that. Even though he was partially guilty, I had a feeling that this wound was impossible to blot.
Don’t forget, he thinks you’re the crazy one, I thought to myself in an effort to cover up the remorse that was taking over. I didn’t want to feel guilty about this. I needed to remember that he wasn’t innocent. Even though he should know better, he would rather think I was crazy than think I could actually be seeing ghosts. That said a lot about how he felt about me.
I let out a long, shaky breath and tried to get my bearings. Regardless of what happened, I still needed to cover up my other wrist.
I walked unsteadily through the salal bushes to where the strips of shirt had fallen like oversized confetti. Even vegetation was scary now.
I picked up a strip and quickly wound it around my wrist as tight as I could without cutting off the circulation. I really was going to have start getting ghost hunters insurance or something like that.
If I was even going to be a ghost hunter after everything that had happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dex decided he didn’t want to work with me anymore. Hell, I didn’t even know if by the time I showed up at the other beach, the boat would even be there. If he sailed away without me, it would be tantamount to homicide. But that look in his eyes had been murderous.
I’d just have to hope for the best. And I’d have to act on it soon. The longer I was here, alone, the more vulnerable I was.
I finished tying up the wound and threw the rest of the cloth back into the trees. As soon as I did so, a familiar scraping sound came from behind me.
I slowly turned around to see but there was nothing there except for the picnic table, our cooking gear and the tent.
The scraping sound again. Pebbles on the beach. The sound that the coffins had made the night before.
I didn’t want to look, but I knew I had to. I gingerly crept to the edge of the tent and poked my head around the side of it.
The coffins had washed up on the beach again. Eight of them; old, decaying wood crates, sitting there in the surf like dead whales. It was still terrifying, even in the daylight.
They were all lined up in a row, perfectly placed, waiting for…
The lids of the coffins popped off simultaneously, clattering on the stones.
The Chinese lepers with their poor bulbous faces and missing hands and feet, lurched out of the coffins and, catching sight of my head peeking out beside the tent, started heading my way in jerky, awkward movements.
Just like zombies, I thought mildly. Then it sank in. Whatever the fuck they were, they were coming for me, and considering they were walking around on stumps, some even on all fours like disfigured hounds, they were coming fast. The reality hit me like a sledgehammer. This was real. This was it.
I had to run and I had to run fast.
I turned and sprinted up the path, turning into the woods. I moved my legs as fast as they would go. I didn’t know if they could catch up to me and I didn’t want to waste time looking behind me, so I just kept going, leaping over logs, sprinting across dead twigs, launching myself over the mud puddles. The only advantage I had was that I had walked across this stupid, godforsaken path so many times, it was like I knew it like the back of my hand, knew each turn and twist and obstacle that was waiting to trip me up.
Then again, this island was their home. My knowledge was nothing compared to theirs.
I could only hear the blood from my heart pounding at a techno rate in my head, my breath as it wheezed with each painful inhale, the sound of my boots hitting the ground, kicking up sticks and sending dirt flying.
I rounded a slight bend, knowing that the dead glade was coming up ahead and the real mud pits that were waiting to try and swallow me whole again. I was making good time, at least I thought I was, but I hadn’t come across Dex yet. He must have run the whole way too. Smart boy.
I entered the glade seemingly at the speed of light, not looking around, just concentrating on the fast–approaching ground as it rushed at my feet. For some reason I had “More Human Than Human” as my mental soundtrack. It worked to keep me moving, to keep me going, to keep me from turning around seeing what was behind me. I was grateful and amazed at the adrenaline I had rushing through my muscles and that I was able to keep running without collapsing in a heap in the mud.
The mud was now upon me on either side, new puddles and depressions that weren’t there earlier. I had to leap quickly across them, narrowly going in a few times. I kept my eyes at my feet and up ahead on the trail. There was a huge puddle in the way.
I leaped to the left side of it, nearly colliding with an ancient mossy stump. I pushed myself off of it in time to see Reverend John Barrett leap out from behind it, rope stretched across his hands.
Before I had time to scream or react, his slimy, foul–smelling hand was at my mouth and the rope was going around my arms. I kicked out with my legs, squirming violently, trying desperately to break free, but it was useless.
He held me above the ground, choking away my breath, and turned me around in time to see the pack of lepers slinking towards me with vengeful curiosity, their fingerless hands extended and reaching for me. They didn’t stop coming.