I seem to be stuck at 52,000 words in my current WIP. I’ve begun to wonder if there’s a story there, or if I’ve begun to ramble. I’m not at all sure who’s ever going to want to turn pages in this one. My beta readers assure me it’s good, but what do they know? Oh, yeah, wait… they know a lot. That’s why I’ve gathered them. (Thank you Lacey, Jill, Cathy, Steven, Andrew, Chuck, Andrea, and Johanna! (hope I didn’t forget anybody))
So I took some time off to work on another, older, project, and somewhere in that process, an odd little line came to me, and I wrote it down on a Post-it note and went on. That line became this story, which attempts to deal (as does nearly everything I write) with who we really are, who we become under stress, what lies under the veneer.
The Ones With No Names
(copyright 2010 Levi Montgomery)
Garcia dreamed of San Diego three mornings in a row. We listened to him in the hushed attitudes appropriate to receiving Messages From Beyond.
“No, no, no, seriously, dudes, listen to me!” he urged us, the melody of his voice lulling. “It means we’re going home, dudes! The streets, the corners, the babes! Ahhh, the babes!”
We listened, then we turned away.
The fourth morning, Garcia was dead.
We stood there in a ring, looking down at him. “He’s home, dudes,” Jones said, saved from mockery only by the sincerity of his tone.
We decided someone should say something, but no one knew what to say. We decided someone should pray, but none of us knew how to pray for the dead. We decided we should bury him, but at that exact second, as though it had been waiting for that one decision, the cat leaped from the jungle, scattering us like dry oak leaves before a wind, and by the time we’d gathered by the fire again, the chance of burial was gone.
I think on some level, we never did forgive ourselves for not burying the first one down.
*****
In the jungle, we found a stone house, built for giants. The steps leading up to the front door were as tall as our heads. Harrison, of course, just put her hands on the edge and vaulted up. Three strides across the stone, and she did it again, and then again. She stopped on the third step and looked back at us.
“Come on,” she called. “What are you waiting for?”
That was her nature, her way. Whatever it is, put both hands on the edge of it and vault up. The first night, she’d come to my side, long after the others were sleeping, salvaged quilts and sheets and deck awnings for bedding. Not a word, not a sound. She shook me awake, opened my jeans, mounted me like an exercise machine, and met her needs. Afterward, I asked her name.
“Harrison,” she said, a faint tinge of surprise. “I said that, when we all gathered on the beach.”
“No, I meant…” but I trailed off to nothing. She stood up, settled her clothing with no thought at all, and went back to her torn blanket.
Silly me, I’d thought it meant something. I’d thought it meant we were something, some combination greater than our separate selves, but the next night, she’d used McElroy the same way, and the next night another. I had no doubt at all my turn would come again. Seven of us, and two were women. Five slots in the rotation. Four now.
I watched the smooth tight curve of her perfect butt as she turned and did it again, four steps now, four steps above and beyond us in that stone-green jungle. I heaved myself after her.
We caught her on the last step before the door, taller than the rest. She wasn’t waiting for us, she was stopped by its height. She’d tried the massive fig-looking roots trailing over the edge, and she’d gotten up a ways, but they were too far to the side, and she was standing there, gazing up, her feet spread and her hands on her hips, when we caught up.
“Boost me up,” she said to me, before I’d even fully come to rest beside her, and I bent toward her, bent to her will, bent without question or the thought of question to meet her needs. She raised her bare foot to my laced fingers, but before we got any farther than that, McElroy boosted Henry up to the edge.
“It’s huge!” he called, his voice echoing. He stepped forward.
“Wait!” I said too late. A snickering slithering sliding sound, a flash of movement, a threat too fast to follow. Not a sound from Henry. His short, squat body stood for a moment, as though watching his head roll down into the interior of the stone house, then crumpled quietly and without drama to the ground.
*****
We buried Henry on the beach, above the high-tide mark, piling driftwood and stones to cairn the site. We may have piled twice as high, to make up for losing Garcia’s chance. Or we may not. It may have only been me.
Five of us now. Three in the rotation.
We needed ropes, we needed some way to make light in the dim interior of that stone echo, and the next morning, Harrison casually stripped off her clothes and waded into the surf. I looked around, a sneaky little proprietary air of shame by proxy, but I made no move to stop her. If she didn’t go, someone else would have to. I watched the dark triangle as she dived into the surf and struck out strongly for the wreck.
She came back with only one line, perhaps a hundred feet of light nylon, but it was better than what we’d had before. It was better than nothing. “No flashlights,” she said, sweeping sea water from her gleaming body before she dressed, making no effort to turn away. The short copper-colored dress looked wrong, somehow, but we were all here in what we’d worn. Her shoes, high heeled, thin strapped, gold buckled, were long gone when she first came ashore. Not one word of complaint. No shoes equals no shoes – let’s go. That and that two-handed vault, those were her. Let’s go.
*****
That was our fifth morning on the island, although it was only our third breakfast. Fish. What else? I threw bones into the sea, muttering and glaring at the fast, lucky gulls. Too fast, too lucky.
We lost the path several times, but we found our way back to those giant steps, back to the fig trees, the gaping doorway, the green stone echo. Carefully, we climbed the last step, tall, taller than any of us. I boosted Jones and McElroy first, then handed Harrison and Ashley up to them. Ashley was the youngest, seventeen or eighteen, much younger than the rest. I lifted her, my hands under her muddy Nike, the zipper of her expensive ragged cutoffs inches from my face, as she groped whimpering for the hands above her, her eyes squeezed shut. Harrison shook her head and turned away, took a step and then another. When Ashley was gone, her scratched, sunburned thighs wiggling away over the edge, white bites of her panties showing, Harrison turned back, put one bare foot in my hands, and sprang to the edge, not waiting for anyone to reach down. That two-handed vault again, and she stood beside them.
McElroy lowered the rope, and I scrambled after her as nimbly as I could.
Knowing the trap was there may have been an advantage. Knowing where the treadle must be, knowing where the swinging blade must have sprung from, may have given us an edge over Henry. Or he may simply have been overwhelmed by the sheer size of that echo, the dark endless length of the passage, sloping down and down and down into the hillside. Standing there, knowing what we knew, we could see the outline of the treadle, the slot of the blade.
Why we thought we needed to follow that mythic shout, I can’t say, where we thought we were going, what we were doing. No rescue for us, no refuge, no peace, lay in any direction that tunnel could lead. Ashley hugged herself and shivered, staring at her feet. McElroy and Jones and I began to discuss the engineering we’d need, a stone to trip the treadle, a peg to hold it up till we were ready, the rope strung out down the steps, logs to jam the swirling slither of the blade. Blades, maybe, McElroy said, and we began to search for other slots, other cracks.
Harrison twisted sideways, her hands and breasts flat to the stone, her weight on her toes, her heels suspended above the outline of the treadle. She sidled swiftly past that danger. “Come on,” she said, turning, impatient. “What are you waiting for?”
Ashley wouldn’t go. McElroy and Jones joined Harrison on the other side, urging us in more and more impatient tones, but Ashley began to cry. Finally, I pressed her to the stone, her hands under mine, her chest against the wall and mine against her back. Four-footed and awkward, we inched across, her eyes clinched shut, her cheeks wet. I was surprised and dismayed at my reaction to her closeness. I had daughters older than her. “It’s ok, honey, it’s ok, we’re almost there,” I whispered to her, over and over. All of time and eternity, it took to sidle past that five-foot slab of chiseled stone, Jones and McElroy reaching and urging, Harrison pacing and muttering.
It was her, of course, who knew how to tie the arcane knots that left us with one length of the rope leading off the front of our waists and one off the back. Harrison. Harrison knew that. Spaced along the rope like beads on a string, we set off in the darkness, down the straight, sloping tunnel, as wide as I could spread both arms, as high as the thinning hair on my head.
McElroy, Jones, Harrison, Ashley, me. I don’t know why she chose that order, or if she did. Perhaps it was simply the order she came to us, the way we were standing, waiting for one of us to say what came next. I coiled the line between Ashley and I, slung it on my arm and walked with my fingertips on the small of her back, one hand trailing the wall.
“Where are you from, Ashley?” I asked, to try to distract her. She sniffled a bit.
“Santa Barbara,” she said, almost silently, her teeth hitting the T three times.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” she whispered. Harrison called for quiet. I hooked my fingers through the rope around her waist.
“We’re going to be fine,” I breathed in her ear, but neither of us believed me.
We had no lights. There’d been no flashlights aboard the wreck, and we’d tried torches on our first night, but they went out in minutes. All we had were fallen fronds from the weedy trees, bits of vine, dead leaves, driftwood. With pine branches, we might have been ok. I’d burned a lot of pine-branch torches in my teens.
As it turned out, we could see a bit. I don’t know if there was some bio-luminescent something down there, or if the stone bounced light from the tunnel entrance, or if was sheer magic, but as dark as it got, we could still see the faint, looming shadows of ourselves. I could see a glimmer from the folds of Harrison’s copper dress, the pale blotch of McElroy’s white dress shirt. I could see Ashley’s tiny cutoffs, floating like a pale ghost below my fingertips.
Straight into the hillside, sloping down, the path led us for fifteen minutes, then lurched suddenly to the left. Down again, steeper but not as far, and then to the left. Around and around and around, down and down and down, and then McElroy shouted, one single quick bark of surprise, cut off suddenly. Jones grunted as the line went tight around him, went to his knees hard, scrabbled to a sliding gasping stop.
“Stay put!” I said to Ashley, dropping the coiled line, moving past her. Harrison, of course, was already moving. We went to our knees by Jones, took as much strain from him as we could, got our weight settled, pulled the limp deadweight of McElroy back up to our level. I felt for his pulse, listened for his heartbeat, tried to feel his breath on my face, as Harrison crawled from one side of the tunnel to the other, lying flat, stretching her arms as far as she could over that sudden edge.
We were stopped. From what, I still don’t know.
*****
We buried McElroy above the high-tide mark, next to Henry. I tried to pile his cairn as high as Henry’s, to show that modicum of respect, but my heart may not have been in it. Two, now. Two in line for Harrison’s needs.
We kicked the fire up, waited for the sun to sink into the sea so far away, so near our homes. After dark, as we had every night, we carried burning driftwood out over the lagoon, and the fish came up to see what this strange bug-bringing light was, and we speared them with split sticks. Harrison, of course. Harrison had known to do that.
We cleaned the fish and spread them on sticks above the fire, but in truth, all we were waiting for was for the flesh to lose the chill of the sea. As we waited, Jones slid closer and closer to Ashley, talking to her, murmuring, whispering. She slid away each time he slid closer, but he was gaining on her. She slid up against me, and I put my arm around her, my eyes on his. He turned away, but not quickly.
“I think it’s done,” he said, pulling a smoky fish from the rack.
Ashley brought her blanket over by mine that night. She lay there, the blanket pulled to her chin, her eyes far away in the sky as Harrison chose Jones. It would have been McElroy, I think.
“I want to go home,” Ashley said, strangely calm.
“I know, honey,” I said. “We will.”
“Before…” she asked, but she didn’t finish.
“Soon,” I said, when it was clear she wasn’t going on.
Some time went by. Harrison was done. She settled her clothes and went to bed. Jones stalked off into the night.
“I’ve never…” Ashley said, but again she didn’t finish. Instead, she looked to where Jones had disappeared and back to me.
“You won’t have to,” I said. “Not unless you want to.”
“I don’t!” she said, with no hesitation at all.
“You won’t have to.”
Jones came back after a short time, fidgety, smoldering. He stretched out on his blanket and turned his back aggressively toward me. I looked at Ashley. I could see her eyes, glowing in the dwindling firelight, watching me. I laid my head down. I closed my eyes. I had daughters her age.
“You won’t have to,” I whispered to her again when she’d gone to sleep.
I got up and paced away to the edge of the jungle, to the yawning echo there. No stone steps, no giant house, nothing but that downward echo, and I began to walk. Down and around, down and around, Ashley flitting unseen ahead of me, her dress glowing white, exactly as long as the white bites of her panties. Harrison was there, a torch in her hand. “You can’t,” she said. “I have needs. You cannot pass.” Beyond her, Ashley, her dress pure white. Long sleeves, high collar, the hem piled on the ground at her feet. Danger crouched beyond the torchlight.
*****
In the morning, we saw prints, all pads and no claws and as big as saucers, circling the very edge of the firelight. Definitely bigger fires, we decided. And guards, all night. We went nowhere that day. We spent the morning amassing a pile of driftwood, the ragged fronds from the edge of the jungle for kindling. Ate the last of last night’s fish and dodged the sun in the meager shade of the clumpy grass and made plans for when we got home. When, we all said as assertively as if we believed it. Not if. When.
Jones stared at Ashley, stared at me, stared at Harrison. His eyes kept wandering the edges of Ashley’s cutoffs, her black French-cut tee shirt.
In the afternoon, Harrison and I set out up the beach to see what lay beyond the point, but before we got there, she turned to say something to me and stopped, looking back toward our camp. I turned to follow her gaze. Ashley was backing slowly around the fire, Jones stalking after her with his hands spread like Me? I’m nothing, I’m nobody, don’t be afraid of me. We hurried back, but he walked off down the beach the other way when he saw us coming. Without a word, Harrison bared that body of hers again and set out toward the wreck.
When she came back, she stopped in waist-deep water for a few moments, squatted down, her arms busy. I thought she was simply bathing, and I turned away, as I would for anyone else. As she would not. She rose and walked, streaming and naked, from the sea. She sluiced water from her skin, picked up her dress, jerked her head at me. She walked away from the fire, and I followed.
“Come here,” she said, buttoning her dress. “This log. Remember it. Come here.” She walked on, and I followed, confused.
“This rock, with the split peak on top.” She walked on past it several yards. “When you can see directly along that log,” she said, stopping, “and that split peak lines up with the top of the hill, there’s a rock on the bottom of the lagoon. There’s a diving knife there, in the sand. Leave it there unless you need it.” She walked away, unanswered and casual, back to the fire. I followed, slowly.
We gathered green leaves, fed them to the fire in armfuls to make smoke. The thin trickle wafted to the treetops and dissipated. Tomorrow, we decided, tomorrow we’ll launch an expedition to the hilltop, to set a flag there, our largest deck awning on the highest tree we can find.
We watched the sun sink. We carried our torches out, stabbed the waiting fish, warmed their flesh in the leafy smoke. Harrison came to me after dark. Ashley, three feet away, turned her back. Jones, across the fire, did not. Finished, Harrison went back to her blanket.
I counted stars. I named the ones with no names. I watched Ashley’s eyes gleam in the dark, not blinking, watching me. I remembered the cat, and got out of bed. I sat and fed driftwood to the demanding flames all night.
*****
Harrison made Jones walk point. She didn’t order him. She didn’t argue. She came to me while he was off at the edge of the jungle, after our breakfast of warmed fish, and said he was walking point so she could keep an eye on him, and I was going last so I could keep an eye on Ashley. Fine by me, I told her, but maybe not by him. He’ll walk point, she said.
When he came back, she set off briskly toward the edge of the jungle, cast a look at those enormous prints in the sand, hesitated one imperceptible moment, gave him a brave stiff-upper-lip look, and quickened her pace.
“I’ll take point,” he said brusquely, pushing past her as if he’d brook no argument. She never even looked toward me, falling in behind him. I set my fingertips in Ashley’s back and we set out.
There was no trail, just a path of least resistance. The jungle’s idea of least resistance was beyond us, and we doubled back to the beach, walked north to the point, and tried again, straight up the ridgeline. Jones conquered each obstacle as though to prove something. Harrison vaulted them as though to get beyond them. Ashley, her face grimy with determined tears, crawled and scrambled, as I pushed from behind. Every time she stretched her foot toward some rock or log, I watched for the flash of white. I had daughters older than her.
Halfway up, the ridge became a ramp, flat and smooth, as wide as that echoing tunnel. A hundred yards past that, two stone heads as tall as I was faced each other across the trail, another pair a dozen paces beyond them, and another and another and another, as far as we could see. The heads had legs, but they were baby legs, crouched like lions. They had arms, baby arms, crossed beneath their chins. Though the design was crude, the execution was smooth and skilful, the surfaces free of chisel marks or cracks. The eyes were pits, as wide as my hand, deeper than I could see. The noses were flat, squashed down toward the round mouths. The lips were perfect circles, fat rolls around thrusting tongues, six inches long. The ears were long and heavy, stone rings as big as punch bowls in the lobes.
We searched the ground around them for treadles, searched the heads for blade cracks. Jones took a branch from the edge of the jungle and probed the ground between them. Nothing. We walked carefully between them, Jones, Harrison, Ashley, me. Nothing.
The next pair was identical, and we searched them just as carefully, probed the ground, walked between them. Another pair and another pair and another. At the sixth pair, Jones cast one swift look back at Harrison and strode through and the heads thrust their tongues out and pierced him neatly, right through the ribcage, the stony spears passing one another, inches to spare. Not a sound from Jones, not a word, not a moan. He cast that look back, saying Look at me. I can vault things, too. He strode through. He slumped against the spears and was finished.
There was no trigger we could ever find. There was no way to release those stone tongues, no way to get him down. Then leave him, Harrison said, looking not at me but at Ashley. Leave him.
*****
I planted a stick as tall as me in the beach, as big as my arm, above the high-tide mark, and began a calendar. A stone at the end of the stick’s shadow each noontime. That flat figure eight, that infinity symbol, is almost finished. Harrison brought her diving knife ashore. We carry our torches out across the lagoon in the evenings, to spear the fish. We smoke the fish and eat them, making our quiet and repetitive plans for if we get home.
Harrison takes the early watch each night, although we’ve seen no sign of the cat since we left Jones standing in the path, held up by the stone heads, his own head slumped as though to search for a treadle. She comes to me with her needs when her watch is done, before mine begins.
On our forty-seventh night, Ashley turned toward me as we lay by the fire. I’d been watching the stars, naming the ones with no names.
“I want to,” she whispered, but she didn’t say what. I named another dozen stars, turned toward her.
“You don’t have to,” I said, but I laid my hand on her stomach, above her blanket.
“I want to,” she whispered. I slipped my hand under her blanket. I have daughters older than her. Harrison turned away that night, but she doesn’t now. I sleep with my arm around Ashley, my face in her hair, the ones with no names waiting above me.
