Island

Musings on My Return to the Journal

It’s where I left it. So I’ve opened it. So now I’m writing again.

I don’t know why I’m bothering.

Except, like Kimberly said, we’ve got to have a record of what’s been happening here.

Maybe the cops’ll get their hands on it, someday.

Yeah, right.

Do they have cops in this goddamn armpit of the universe? Do they have anyone?

I know one thing: I don’t ever want to see this thing get published. Not anymore. Not after what happened.

“After what happened?” you ask.

I don’t know what happened.

It has been a few days since my last entry in the journal. I think. I’m not sure how long it’s been.

I just now turned back a couple of pages to read what’s there and refresh my memory. It’s almost like somebody else wrote them. Wrote them a long time ago. Years ago. So much has changed.

I’m embarrassed to see what I wrote.

Example: I expect he’ll try to kill me again. The placement of again makes it sound like I’ve already been killed once. But that isn’t the real problem. (One can’t be held accountable for the grammar of dialogue, right? And who gives a rat’s ass, anyway?) The real problem is my cavalier, jaunty fucking attitude. Ah, yes, my good Wesley? He’ll likely make another try for me. Tut, tut. Have to be on my guard, won’t I? Have to remember to duck.

Well, here’s news.

It wasn’t me he got.

It was them.

Kimberly, Billie and Connie.

They’re gone with the fucking wind, and I’m not. I’m here, back at the beach, writing in my journal, alive and well and alone.

I’m not planning to get killed.

Another gem from my previous entry.

Talk about arrogance.

Talk about being the prime asshole of the world.

Talk about prophetic.

Of course, I don’t actually know if the women have been killed. I think it’s likely, but I’m not sure. I know some of what happened, but not everything. They were still alive when I went down, but what happened to them afterwards?

I don’t know.

I know they’re gone, though.

I can’t handle this. I’m going for a swim. Maybe I’ll be lucky and a shark’ll eat me for dinner.

War Party

This is the next day.

I was too messed up to do any more writing yesterday. I went for a swim, like I said. The sharks didn’t get me, though. I didn’t see hide nor hair of any sharks.

I did consider suicide, though.

One of those really cool, melodramatic suicides like you’ve seen in a billion crappy movies—where some idiot goes swimming off into the sunset. The deal is, I guess, you keep swimming away from shore until you get too pooped to make it back. So even if you eventually change your mind, you’re history.

There are several reasons why I didn’t do it.

A. Drowning sucks.

B. Being dead sucks.

C. Being the lone survivor is not a fate worse than death.

D. I’m not one hundred per cent sure that all the gals are dead.

E. If I kill myself, I won’t be able to do any of the things that I want very badly to do to Wesley and Thelma.

F. Like it or not, I do feel a certain obligation to play Ishmael and tell thee, to be the Horatio of our noble, lost band and report our cause aright to the unsatisfied.

Other than not kill myself, what I did yesterday is of little consequence. I swam, I ate, I wept, I slept.

Today, I’ll tell what happened to us on day eight.

As much as I know, anyway.

Day six was when Thelma returned, battered and claiming that she’d killed Wesley. That night, she went at me with her razor. Then she escaped by swimming away.

Day seven, we did a lot of talking about what had happened on night six. And I did a lot of writing about it. Other than that, nothing of consequence happened. Connie’s injuries were the main reason why we didn’t take any action. She seemed to be getting better, though.

Nothing happened that night.

Day eight, Connie was still sore but she was ready for action. We all were. We knew it was time to go after Wesley and Thelma.

We hoped that Wesley was already dead.

We were fairly sure that Thelma had lied about killing him, just as she’d lied about nearly everything else. We thought mere was a good chance, however, that Wesley had died from the wounds he got on the night of our ambush. Kimberly had put her spear through his left tit, and she’d rammed a hole into his ass. As a result of those wounds, he could’ve died from blood loss or from infection.

If he wasn’t dead, we figured he might at least be incapacitated.

On the other hand, maybe he’d recovered enough to be a real threat to us.

We’d discussed every possibility that we could think of.

We’d concluded that anything was possible, but that we were more likely to have trouble from Thelma than Wesley.

We set out at mid-morning.

Kimberly wore Keith’s Hawaiian shirt over her white bikini. She carried her tomahawk on its rope sling. The Swiss Army knife puckered out the front of her pants. The spear was in her left hand.

Billie wore her same black bikini and no shirt, of course. Her chest was crossed by ropes. The single line of the tomahawk sling swept down from her shoulder to her right hip. The remains of the hanging rope (which we’d used for tying Thelma’s hands) crossed her from the other shoulder. It was long enough to make three loops. We’d decided to bring it along in case we took a captive.

Though Kimberly was the one with Indian blood in her veins, Connie looked more the part. Because of her headband. She wore it to hold the bandage in place against her wound. The bandage was a pad of cloth made from her old T-shirt. The T-shirt had been ruined, anyway, so Billie had washed it in the stream and cut it up.

Connie also wore a vest. She’d made it herself, using my razor on day seven to cut it out of a beach towel. It had yellow and white horizontal stripes. Even though it didn’t weigh much, it helped to hold a bandage down against her left shoulder. It also protected her shoulders and upper back from the sun, though it had no sleeves and was so short that it left her arms and lower back exposed. Not to mention her rump, which was as good as naked in that thong.

Before we set out, I offered to spread some of Billie’s sunblock on her bun. She told me to fuck off. (Like I said, she was feeling better.)

The vest couldn’t be shut in front, but the towel panels covered her breasts—her real reason for making and wearing the thing, more than likely. To keep them out of my sight. To taunt me and punish me.

Logically, she should’ve made herself a skirt, too. But she didn’t. Did she think I had no interest in her lower regions? It didn’t make any sense, really. But then, you could go crazy trying to make sense out of Connie.

She was sure good to look at, though. They all were.

To think that I might never see any of them again… It isn’t fair. I know this is a terrible thing to write, but I feel cheated.

They’re dead, and I feel cheated.

Sooner or later, maybe one of them would’ve… either fallen for me or gotten so desperate…

Maybe not. We’ll never know.

What is for sure, though, is that they aren’t here to look at, to daydream about, to talk with, to sometimes hold.

Which makes me realize that I’ve had hugs from all three of them, at one time or another.

I’ve seen Billie’s breasts and Connie’s, but never Kimberly’s. Now, I never will see hers. Along with all the other things I’ll never…

I had to stop writing for a while.

It depressed me too much—to put it mildly. I miss them so much. I can’t stand the thought that they are dead.

I don’t know for sure that they are dead.

A big mistake, around here, to assume that anyone is dead.

What I need to do is find them. I need to know whether they are dead or alive. If they’re alive, they are almost certainly being held captive. Maybe I’ll be able to rescue them. If they’re dead, I’ll… I don’t know what. In either case, though, I have to kill Wesley and Thelma.

I should be out searching for them right now, not sitting here on the beach.

But I want to bring the journal up to date first. That way, in case I don’t come back, there will be a record.

Back to the story.

I’d been telling about Connie’s towel-vest. Because of the injury to her left shoulder, she wore the rope of her tomahawk sling on her right shoulder. The rope crossed her chest, and the tomahawk hung by her left hip. In her left hand, she carried her spear—the special, wicked one she’d made for fishing.

As for me, the day seemed too hot for Billie’s pink blouse, so I went without it. I wore Andrew’s khaki shorts. I haven’t worn my swimming trunks since the day I started wearing Andrew’s shorts. I like having the pockets, and the shorts are so big and roomy that they give me plenty of freedom. I wore shoes and socks, too, by the way.

I haven’t written much about footwear. That’s because it doesn’t interest me much, and so far it hasn’t been of any great importance. We all had shoes to wear. Sometimes we wore them; sometimes we went barefoot. Not much else to say on the subject.

For weapons, I had the ax in both hands, a tomahawk at my hip (stuck under my belt, which I’d gotten back after the loan to Connie), and Thelma’s straight razor. Kimberly thought I should get to keep the razor. For one thing, it was the weapon I’d almost gotten murdered with. For another, even though Kimberly had actually found the razor where it had fallen in the sand, she pointed out that I’m the one who’d knocked it out of Thelma’s hand.

Besides, Kimberly had her Swiss Army knife, Connie didn’t even want to touch the razor, and Billie thought I should keep it because I was obviously the one in the most danger.

Wrong.

We were so damn wrong about that.

Anyway, I had the razor safely folded inside the right front pocket of my shorts, along with Andrew’s lighter and Billie’s plastic bottle of sunblock. (My other front pocket bulged with chunks of fish that we’d smoked overnight and wrapped in some leftover cellophane.) So that’s pretty much the way we were—how we were dressed and armed and so on—when we set out on the morning of day eight to hunt for Wesley and Thelma.

We’d agreed to try our luck at the lagoon. It seemed the most likely place to find them.

But Kimberly said, “This way,” and started walking toward the inlet.

We went after her.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We shouldn’t look like we’re on our way to the lagoon,” she said.

“Are you kidding?” Connie asked. “Who do you think is watching?”

“Probably no one. But maybe Wesley or Thelma.”

“Give me a break.”

“We’ll just go up the shore for a while, make them think we’re off to explore the island.”

Then what?” Connie asked. “Sneak around behind the lagoon?”

“Yep,” Kimberly said.

“Fabulous.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” I said.

Connie gave me a sneer. “You would.”

“Look what happened last time,” Billie told her. “We don’t want to repeat the same mistake. If we come in from the back, maybe we’ll take them by surprise.”

“I think it’s stupid,” Connie said. “We’ll probably get lost.”

She was outnumbered.

With Kimberly in the lead, we climbed the ridge of rocks just to the north of our beach, made our way down to the other side, and hiked along the shoreline.

Connie glanced back, now and then. “How far are we gonna go?” she asked.

“Let’s make it around that point,” Kimberly said.

It was pretty far off.

Connie wrinkled her nose.

“If anyone’s watching,” Kimberly explained, “they’ll think we’re trying to circle the island.”

“Maybe we should circle the island,” I said.

“Some other time. First, we’ve gotta take care of Wesley and Thelma. They’re too big a threat. After we’ve killed them, we’ll be able to explore the island to our heart’s content. What we’ll do, as soon as we get to the other side of the point, is take cover in the jungle and make our way back till we’re sure of our bearings…”

“Why don’t I just wait for you here?” Connie offered.

“You’re not helping matters,” Kimberly said. “We know you’re hurt, but…”

“But you’re gonna make me walk a few extra miles, anyway.”

“What about trying to circle the island?” Billie asked Kimberly. “It might not be a bad idea.”

“It’s a fine idea,” Kimberly said. “For some other day.”

“No, hold on. Except for a couple of short little trips into the jungle, we’ve been cooped up on that beach ever since we got here. We don’t know what we might find.”

“Probably the dinghy,” I said.

Connie stopped glowering. “Yeah! If we find the dinghy, we can get outa here.”

“This might not even be an island,” Billie said. “How do we know we didn’t land on… the end of a peninsula, or something?”

“It’s an island,” Kimberly said. “Dad was showing me the charts the night before we got here.” She nodded. “We’re nowhere near any mainland. Nothing for miles around but scads of little islands.”

“Well, that was just… I know we aren’t on a continent Or something. But we don’t know what island this is, or how big it is. It might very well be inhabited. We might even find some sort of town.”

“And police,” Connie said. She was perking up. In spite of her injuries, she would apparently be delighted to walk for miles in search of the dinghy or a precinct house.

Billie nodded. “It couldn’t hurt to just keep going on the beach and see what…”

“Be my guest,” Kimberly said. “I’m not interested. The rest of you wanta bail out on me, that’s your problem. I don’t care if there’s a metropolis around the corner, I’m going into the jungle after Wesley and I’m not coming out till I’ve got his head.”

I couldn’t help it. I gave her a buggy-eyed stare and said, “His head? You mean, like, figuratively speaking?”

She just looked at me.

Which was all the answer I needed.

I muttered, “Jesus.”

Billie had that look on her face—a mixture of amusement and disbelief. “You’re not really planning to cut off Wesley’s head?”

“He killed my husband and my father. You know how we towed Dad’s body out? I’d like to swim out to exactly the same place with Wesley’s head, and let it sink there in the same place so Dad’ll see that I took care of business.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

I wanted Wesley dead, too, but it disturbed me to find out that Kimberly had come up with such a bizarre, grisly plan. She’d obviously given it a lot of thought.

It seems she had depths of creepiness I had never even guessed at.

Connie, too, seemed impressed. With a look on her face as if she’d just encountered a little green man, she did a brief rendition of The Twilight Zone’s music—"Doo-de-do-do, doo-de-do-do.” I’d heard her do that before, but never an impression of Rod Serling (or anyone else, for that matter). “One Kimberly Dickens, cheerleader, prom queen, loving daughter and faithful wife. She came to a tropical island in search of a picnic, and found instead that she had slipped into a netherworld of primitive…”

“Knock it off,” Kimberly said.

“Hey, you’re talking about decapitating someone.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“Not with that, with you. I mean, you’re creeping me out. You start talking about taking a guy’s head off—even his—and it starts making me wonder if you’ve lost a few screws.”

Kimberly frowned at her, then shrugged. “You’re probably right, I shouldn’t go around saying stuff like that.” She glanced at each of us. “I guess maybe I got carried away. I’m not missing any screws. A couple of them might be slightly loose, but… don’t worry, I haven’t gone crazy.”

“I’ve had some pretty horrible thoughts, myself,” Billie said. “Things I’d like to do to Wesley. Some of them are a lot worse than chopping his head off.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Well, so have I,” Connie admitted. Meeting Kimberly’s gaze, she said, “The difference is, you mean to do it.”

“I don’t know,” Kimberly said. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” With that, she turned away and continued walking.

Billie, Connie and I gave each other looks.

Kimberly had spooked all three of us.

None of us talked much, after that. Connie didn’t even raise any more complaints.

Our silence must’ve bothered Kimberly. After a while, she frowned over her shoulder at us. “What’s the matter with you people?”

Billie just shook her head.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nope,” said Connie, “nothing wrong here.”

Kimberly turned around and walked backward. “You people! For Godsake, I was kidding. Okay? Christ! You’d think I was foaming at the mouth! I’m not gonna cut off anybody’s head, okay? I didn’t mean it. I never should’ve said it. Now you all think I’ve flipped out. Anyway, as a matter of fact, so what if I wanta cut off his head? You think he hasn’t got it coming? He chopped Dad’s head in half. In my book, anything he gets is better than what he deserves. If we’re lucky enough to catch him alive, what we oughta do is skin him. We oughta spend a few days killing him a little bit at a time, make him scream till he’s hoarse, make him beg for death. If you think cutting his head off is extreme, just wait and see what I do to himbefore I take his head. He’s gonna pay big-time for murdering Dad and Keith. If you think I’m mad now, just wait and see. You’ve got no idea what I’m capable of.”

The three of us gaped at her.

She suddenly swung out an arm as if trying to bat away a trio of pesky flies. “Get out of here. Leave me alone. I’ll take care of Wesley and Thelma. I don’t need the three of you hanging around… You’re all useless, anyway. None of you has got the stomach for what’s coming, so get outa my face. Go! Get outa here!” She swung her arm again, then spun around and took off running.

“Don’t!” Billie yelled. “Hey! Wait up!”

“Ah, let her go,” Connie said.

“Kimberly!” I shouted.

She kept running.

Billie took off after her.

“Mom!”

Billie didn’t stand a chance of catching up with Kimberly, so I joined the chase. Even lugging the ax with me, I was able to gain on Billie. But Kimberly, faster than both of us, kept drawing away. And I could tell that she wasn’t even running full tilt.

Connie shouted at our backs, “Damn it! Come back! Are you all out of your fucking minds?”

Billie, still slightly ahead of me, glanced over her shoulder.

So did I.

Connie just stood where she’d been. We were leaving her quite a distance behind us.

Billie stopped running.

I dodged to keep from crashing into her.

“Leave the ax,” she gasped at me. “Get her. This is… gotta stop her.”

I let the ax fall to the sand. Then I put on all the speed I could muster. As I dashed after Kimberly, I yelled, “Quit it! Come on! We’re with you! Slow down! You’re not crazy! Please! Stop running! Please! We wanta go with you!”

A lot of good my shouting did.

It was a waste of breath, so I quit yelling.

Soon, I found myself gaining on her.

She must’ve been allowing me to gain on her.

Not to catch her, though.

She let me approach to within about three strides behind her, but no closer.

I watched the way her black hair streamed behind her. I watched how the seat of her bikini pants, visible under her flapping shirt tail, moved with the flexing mounds of her buttocks. And how her slender legs strode.

As she ran, she held the spear low by her left hip, its shaft parallel to the sand, while her right hand held the tomahawk against her side to stop it from flinging about and pounding her right hip.

Though she didn’t pump at all with her arms, she raced along swiftly enough to stay ahead of me.

After a while, she said, “Give it up, Rupert. Go on back to them.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Forget it.”

“Just stop and wait,” I gasped. “You’re the one… always against us… splitting up. We… gotta stay… together.”

“You’ll get in my way,” she said.

“No. Please.”

“I’m gonna do Wesley my way. Don’t wanta hear you guys whining about it.”

“We… won’t whine.”

“Forget it. You had your chance. Adios, amigo.”

She started to pour it on. I made a dive for her.

My fingertips brushed the flying tail ofher shirt. Moments later, both my hands buried themselves in the sand. They shoved ditches into the beach as I flopped on my chest and skidded.

The landing knocked my wind out.

I lifted my head and watched Kimberly sprint up the beach. Spear raised high, she pumped it up and down as she dashed along like a Zulu on the attack.

Missing People

On my hands and knees, I watched Kimberly until she vanished around the point. Then I stood up, brushed the sand off my body, and started trudging back to Billie and Connie. Billie was a couple of hundred yards away from me, Connie another hundred yards or so behind her mother.

The way we were separated, any one of us could’ve gotten picked off. Keeping an eye on the edge of the jungle, I quickened my pace.

Connie made no attempt to join us. She just stood where she’d stopped, and watched.

When I got within speaking range of Billie, I started shaking my head.

“You almost had her,” Billie said.

“It only looked that way. She slowed down to let me get close.”

“I can’t believe she just ran off and left us.”

“She wants to go on by herself.”

Billie handed the ax to me. “We can’t let her.”

“We can’t stop her,” I pointed out.

“But we can join her.”

“I guess so. If we can find her.”

“She’s on her way to the lagoon,” Billie said. “We’ll just go there.”

We started walking toward Connie.

“What route should we take?” I asked.

“What do you think?” She wasn’t being sarcastic; she was asking my advice.

“Well, we could circle around through the jungle, but that’s what Kimberly’s probably doing. I don’t think we’d have any luck intercepting her, either. It’d be too easy for her to sneak past us. So maybe we oughta just go ahead and make a direct approach to the lagoon.”

“Go straight up the stream?”

“Yeah. That’d be the quickest way to get there. We might even reach the lagoon ahead of her.”

Billie made a rueful smile. “Ahead of her? Think we wanta do that?”

“If we’re careful.”

“I’d hate for us to get attacked without Kimberly around to help.”

I shrugged. “We can probably handle it. I mean, we’re talking about Wesley and Thelma. Unless they take us completely by surprise…”

“What gives?” Connie called to us.

“Kimberly doesn’t want us in her way,” I explained.

“Is she still going to the lagoon?”

“Guess so.”

“Good. We can go back to camp now, right?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“We’ll go back,” Billie said, “but then we’re heading straight up the stream.”

“Oh, really?”

“That’s the idea,” Billie told her.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Connie said. “Let’s not, and say we did.”

We reached Connie. Then the three of us started walking back toward camp.

“I mean,” Connie said, “Kimberly obviously doesn’t want us with her. Shouldn’t we do what she wants, and stay out of it?”

“She’d be outnumbered two to one,” I pointed out.

“That’s just assuming Wesley hasn’t already bought the farm.”

“Even if he has, what’s to stop Thelma from jumping her?”

Connie smirked at me. “You think Kimberly can’t take Thelma?”

“Sure, in a fair fight. But maybe she gets jumped from behind. Thelma almost nailed me. She isn’t that easy.”

“Well, she knew which buttons to push on you, didn’t she?”

“There’s no point arguing,” Billie broke in. “We’re going up to the lagoon, and that’s final.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Billie gave her an annoyed glance, but said nothing. For a while after that, none of us spoke.

We were nearly back to our camp when Connie said to her mother, “It sure is nice to know you care more about Kimberly than you do about me.”

“Don’t give me that,” Billie said.

“I’ve got a splitting headache—and my shoulder’s killing me. I’m an absolute wreck, but you’re gonna make me hike all the way up to the lagoon just to help Kimberly—who doesn’t even want our help.”

“But maybe she needs it.”

“Shit, she ran away from us. Why should we wipe ourselves out when she doesn’t even… ?”

“You know why,” Billie told her.

“I do? Really? That’s news to me.”

“She’s your sister, for one thing.”

“My half-sister.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Very nice. If your father could hear you say that…”

“Well, he can’t. And I don’t appreciate you throwing him in my face all the time.”

“He’s your father and Kimberly’s.”

“Big deal.”

“If you don’t come with us,” Billie said, “I can’t go. I’m not about to leave you by yourself.”

“Fine.”

“You have to do this for her.”

“Yeah? Do I? And what’d she ever do for me?”

They glowered at each other.

“Practically raised you, maybe?” Billie said.

“Oh, for Godsake…”

“Stayed home instead of going away to college. Because of you.”

“She didn’t have to do that.”

“No, she didn’t have to. She wanted to.”

“Didn’t wanta miss out on all those fine opportunities to boss me around.”

I couldn’t help it. I asked, “Why didn’t Kimberly go away to college?”

“She wanted to stay with the family,” Billie explained. “She never came straight out and said so, but that was the reason. We certainly could’ve afforded to send her anywhere, and she had the grades. I think it was almost entirely because of Connie.”

“My fault.” Connie raised her hand.

“Not your ‘fault.’ You were… ten or eleven at the time. When Kimberly was just about your age, a year or two older, maybe—that’s when Thelma went off to college. Kimberly always… She loved Thelma so much. It hurt her so much when Thelma left home.” Billie’s eyes filled with tears. She sniffed, wiped her eyes, and said to Connie, “She just couldn’t… put you through that. You two were so close. She knew how you would miss her.”

Now, tears began to glimmer in Connie’s eyes. “So it was my fault.”

“Don’t be silly. She loved you, that’s all. She didn’t want to leave you without your big sister. And she would’ve missed you too much.” Billie looked at me and wiped her eyes. “That’s why,” she said.

I came out with a lame, “Oh. Just wondering.”

Billie was done crying, but Connie kept it up for a few more minutes. When she finished, she sniffed and rubbed her eyes and said, “I still don’t think Kimberly needs any help from us, but I’ll go along. I mean, what choice do I have, anyway? It’s not like you’re gonna let me stay here by myself while you two run off to save her bacon. As if her bacon needs any saving. I just hope we don’t screw things up for her, that’s all.”

The surprising thing is that, after all her complaints, Connie ended up taking the lead. She seemed to be in a hurry, too.

Billie’s talk must’ve gotten through to her, somehow—reminded her that Kimberly was more than just a young woman put on this earth to annoy her, boss her around, and turn the heads of her boyfriends.

Leading us upstream through the jungle, it was as if Connie had magically forgotten to be self-absorbed—as if all that mattered was the bond between her and Kimberly.

She could be a wonderful human being for short periods of time.

I’d seen it before. It wouldn’t last. But it was nice to see, on the rare occasions when it happened. I found myself actually liking Connie again.

Not that I’d ever stopped liking her body. From the neck down, she’d always been really fine. Her face wasn’t bad, either. Behind her face is where the troubles lurked—inside her mouth, and in her brain. Her words and her thoughts. And, of course, the actions that came from the thoughts.

I liked all of Connie, though, as she led us up the middle of the stream that day.

And she actually did stay that way.

She never got a chance to revert.

The self-centered, whiny, pushy, obnoxious bitch had taken her last bow.

In a way, I almost wish she hadn’t turned into a caring, decent person for her last hour or so. Might be easier. Maybe I wouldn’t miss her so much, now. On the other hand, it’s sort of nice—even wonderful—that she wasn’t being a shit toward the end of things.

God, I miss her.

I miss her almost as much as I miss Billie and Kimberly.

No, not really. Who am I trying to kid?

I miss Connie a lot, but I miss Billie and Kimberly worse. It kills me to think that I’ll never see them again.

And yet, here I sit.

Writing in my journal instead of going to find them.

Why is that?

Simple. If I go looking, I might get killed. God knows, I barely escaped with my life last time.

I’m fairly safe here.

Wesley and Thelma probably think I’m dead. At least for the time being.

Also, there’s one other thing.

I really do not want to find any of my women dead.

Which is what might happen if I go looking.

I’d hate that.

It’s better, not knowing. This way, I can at least hang on to the possibility that they might not be dead.

Or not all of them.

If even just one of them is still alive…

If I had to choose one, I wonder which would it be? Not Connie, I’m afraid; she was a bitch too much of the time. Not nearly as attractive as her mother or half-sister, either. She was better than plain, but both of them were beautiful.

So it’s between Billie and Kimberly.

It would be sick for me to choose which of them should die. So let’s say this: which would I rather have living with me till we get rescued from here?

(If we ever do get rescued, which is seeming less likely all the time. God, what if I have to live the rest of my life on this island without any of them? Just me. Never mind. I want to go on with my game of who to pick.) Kimberly or Billie?

Not an easy choice.

Kimberly is a hothead, sometimes. She can be awfully tough and scary, and would definitely take charge of everything. She would run my life. Which might not be such a bad thing.

Billie is more easy-going and sensible. She’s sweet, cheerful and compassionate. She wouldn’t push me around. We’d be like great friends. We already are—were—awfully good friends, I think.

Obviously, the smart pick is Billie. We’d be great together. Making love with her would be incredible, too. She has a fabulous body, and knows it, and would probably relish the chance to share it.

I’d give anything, though, for just one time with Kimberly.

Who am I kidding? How about one time with anyone?

Losers can’t be choosers.

Speaking of losers, I should stop playing games and go out and try to find Kimberly, Billie and Connie.

Not yet. I can’t go and look for them until I’ve caught up on my journal. It might be the only way anyone will ever be able to learn what has happened here.

And it gives me an excuse to stay put.

Also, the writing of it helps me to remember them. I describe what they did, what they said, what they wore and how they looked, and it’s almost as if they’re with me again.

I have them with me whenever I write about them.

Hey, here’s a thought. Maybe I’ll never stop writing about them. When I catch up to the present, I’ll just start making things up. Just to keep going.

My journal can turn into the literary equivalent of the Winchester House. I just keep going, building more rooms for my ghosts.

Not a bad idea, but I don’t have a hell of a lot of paper left.

When I run out, I’ll start writing in the sand.

Here lies one whose name was writ in sand.

That was somebody’s epitaph, I think. Keats?

This is far off the track, and getting weird. I’m too tired and way too depressed to go on any more right now. Anyway, it’s almost dark.

I’m going to quit now.

Tomorrow will be plenty soon enough to finish off what I can remember about how we got creamed. Then things will be up to date, and then I’ll have to figure out what to do next.

Build a staircase to the ceiling, perhaps???

Oh, God.

I wonder if they are dead.

If not, what the hell is happening to them—being done to them—while I sit here lonesome on the beach fucking around with this stupid journal???

Night Journey

This is the next day.

Last night, I got brave. Or, more likely, just desperate.

So this chapter won’t be about our “last stand,” after all.

Fine with me. I’m not exactly looking forward to the task. I will get to it, but not right now.

Instead, this chapter will be about what happened last night.

After dark, I snuck upstream for a look at the scene of the crime.

It started out as a way to stop feeling like such a worthless loser. I was taking action. I would stalk the night, revisit the places that held such horrible memories, face what had happened to us, and search for answers.

Maybe I would find my women alive, and rescue them.

Maybe I would find their bodies.

Maybe I would come upon Wesley and Thelma, and slit their throats.

I had my razor.

I was Rambo.

I was Rambo until I left the beach behind. The moment I waded upstream into the shadows of the jungle—and out of the moonlight—I stopped being Rambo and became Chicken Little. I could see almost nothing, just a few pale speckles and scattered tatters of dim light that somehow made it down through the trees.

I was tempted to turn back. If I went on, I would probably fall in the dark and bust open my face.

I went on, anyway. Taking tiny steps. Hunkering down low so I wouldn’t have so far to fall. Keeping both my arms forward to catch myself.

That way, I made slow progress up the stream.

I fell several times, banging up my hands and knees but not getting hurt in any serious way.

Frequently, I stopped to rest, stand up straight, and stretch to get the kinks out. Then I’d bend over again and continue on my way. In spite of the rest stops, all the bending tired me out and made me ache. I finally decided to take my chances and walk upright.

It felt good, walking tall.

I had farther to fall, and the falls hurt more, but I felt sort of proud of myself. I stayed high and even quickened my pace.

Sometimes, I felt as if Billie, Kimberly and Connie were walking with me through the night. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. In front of me, behind me, wading by my side.

Other times, I felt alone.

Worse than alone. There can be comfort and peace in being truly alone. The bad kind of alone is not when you’re all by yourself, but when your only company is an unseen stranger, imagined or real, creeping toward you in the dark. You have nobody to help you. There’s no safe place to run. All you can do is keep going and hope for the best.

That sort of aloneness gives you goosebumps scurrying up your spine. It makes your scalp crawl. It makes you feel like someone has shoved an icy hand against your crotch.

That’s the way I felt, off and on, while I was making my semi-blind way up the stream last night.

Off and on.

Coldly spooked when I felt the loneliness.

Warm and safe when the women seemed to be with me.

Off and on. I knew it was only my mind playing games, but I couldn’t control it.

Sometimes, I nearly screamed with fright and ran like hell.

Other times, surrounded by my phantom ladies, I loved the darkness and warmth of the night.

I felt the good way as I approached the lagoon.

Raising my eyes, I saw the moonlit slab of rock where Kimberly had stretched herself flat, days ago, to scan the lagoon for signs of Thelma and Wesley. I climbed onto it. I lay down on it, in exactly the place where Kimberly had been. The warmth of the rock seeped through my shirt and shorts.

She was with me. Her heat was in me.

That’s how I felt, anyhow. It was only in my mind, but maybe that’s no great reason to discount it.

Lying there, I slowly scanned the lagoon.

In places, it sparkled with points of silver moonlight. Mostly, though, it looked black.

This was not a forbidding blackness.

The opposite. One look, and I wanted to be in it. Could hardly wait.

I told myself that I hadn’t come up here for a dip in the lagoon; I’d come to look for the women.

To search for them beyond the far side of the lagoon, above the waterfall and farther upstream where we’d last been together. I wouldn’t find them here. Maybe not there, either, but that was the place to start.

To get there, I needed to cross the lagoon.

On my feet, I looked all around. No glow of firelight was anywhere to be seen. Nor did I see a sign of anyone’s presence. I listened. The only sounds were birds and bugs, plus some of the usual jungle shrieks and jibbers (God knows what they came from), and the quiet splashing sounds of the waterfall on the other side of the lagoon.

Bits of moonlight lit the falls. Otherwise, they were black except for a few dim, gray streamers of froth at the bottom.

I wanted to feel the waterfall spilling onto me. I wanted to feel the lagoon and the night air. I wanted to be gliding through the black water, naked.

I took off my shirt and shoes and socks.

Then I took off my shorts. Naked, I crouched and set them down. I pulled the straight razor out of the right front pocket.

Though I wanted complete freedom in the water—nothing to carry—I suddenly found myself reluctant to leave the razor behind. Someone might steal it. Or I might chance upon Wesley or Thelma. Without the razor, how would I defend myself?

After giving the matter some thought, I put on my right sock and slipped the razor down inside it against my ankle.

Which was exactly the same way I’d carried Andrew’s Swiss Army knife up the tree to cut down Keith. I started to remember about that. It was more than a week ago, but seemed like it had just happened. I could feel the tree against my body, see Keith hanging…

“Don’t think about it,” I said. Even though I spoke in a whisper, the sound of my voice unnerved me a little.

Who else might’ve heard it?

Standing up straight, I looked around. I stood motionless and listened. And started to feel very exposed and vulnerable. I began imagining that someone was out there, hidden in the darkness, spying on me, creeping closer.

As fast as I could, I climbed down the rocky bank and eased myself into the water. My legs vanished. A moment later, everything below my waist was gone, as if I’d been sawed in half by a magician.

Right away, I felt safer.

It would be no trick, at all, to disappear entirely.

My chills began to fade. My goosebumps started to go away. My tight muscles relaxed. A pleasant warmth seemed to be spreading through my whole body.

I felt even better as I waded into deeper water. When it reached my neck, I looked down and there was none of me left to see.

I had become invisible.

Except for my head, of course. Even though I couldn’t see it, I knew that it showed.

If anyone was watching.

So I ducked below the surface to make my head invisible.

Now, I was completely gone. Completely safe. I was all alone in the warm water, surrounded by a jungle where my enemies might be lurking… I felt wonderful. I was not only safe, but invincible.

Staying below, I swam. The water flowed along my body, warm and smooth. After a while, my lungs began to ache. I stayed below, anyway. Soon, I heard the shooshing and plottering of the waterfall.

Underneath the falls, I found footing on the rocky bottom. I turned around and came up slowly. The curtain of dropping water pattered on top of my head, ran down the sides of my face, splashed softly into the water still covering my shoulders.

My head was no longer invisible.

I didn’t feel frightened, though—maybe because it would be so easy to disappear again.

I stood up straight.

And shivered as I did it. This was no shiver of fear, though. This was excitement. I felt daring and powerful as more and more of my body came out of the lagoon and into full view of anyone who might be watching.

How different this was from my last time here! Only a couple of days ago, I’d stood battered and aching and desolate beneath these very falls. I’ll have to write about that in more detail. Soon. Not now, though. For now, I want to tell about last night.

And how I continued to rise up under the falls.

When I was bare down to my waist, I shut my eyes. The falling water splashed onto the top of my head, onto my shoulders and outstretched arms. It slid down my body like warm oil.

This was where Connie had stood, naked, rubbing herself with her wadded T-shirt. She’d stood with her back to me.

In my mind, I turned her around.

I became her.

I was Connie standing under the waterfall, arms out, trembling as the water spilled down my naked body, showing myself to an imaginary Rupert.

Which sounds a trifle odd, now that I try to write about it.

Let’s just say I let my imagination run wild for a while, there at the falls last night. I had so many different emotions swarming through me, I’m lucky I didn’t go nuts entirely and stay that way.

After a while, though, I remembered my reasons for coming up to the lagoon.

Namely, to search for Connie, Billie and Kimberly.

Not for their spirits, but for their bodies—alive or dead.

And to see if I could get some idea about where Wesley and Thelma might be.

To kill them, if I could.

So I waded over to the flat rock where we’d taken Connie after she’d been knocked out. I boosted myself up, got to my feet, and climbed to the top of the falls.

Even though I’d finally gotten back to business, I still felt strange. I was dripping wet and shivering—trembling from head to toe. My jaw even shook. The night probably hadn’t turned any colder while I’d been in the lagoon, but it felt as if the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. Also, I was gripped by a weird mixture of fear and excitement.

At the top of the falls, I stood in a patch of moonlight and gazed down at the lagoon.

My lagoon.

It seemed like a wonderful place just then, and all mine. It was my own private swimming hole, a place where I could be completely free and completely safe, where I could dwell in my memories of Kimberly, Connie and Billie—where they would come alive in my fantasies.

Better to have imaginary friends and lovers than none at all.

In some ways, they might even be an improvement over the real thing. If they only exist in your mind, they can’t get killed.

Plus, they cooperate better than…

(That’s me, going off the deep end again. Maybe I was having—am having?—a slight encounter with a touch of mental breakdown. Could that be? Tee hee hee. And I ain’t even gotten to the BAD part yet. The bad part about last night, that is—as opposed to the bad part when we got attacked several days ago and all three of my women… Never mind. That’s for later, too. I should get back to last night.) I’ll skip over some of the weird shit I was feeling and thinking, etc., while I roamed the jungle naked with the razor in my sock. I’ve got so much to write about, anyway, without dwelling on stuff like mat. (Not to mention that I’ve already filled up more than three-quarters of my notebook. I have about a hundred empty pages left, and that’s counting both sides of the paper.) Here’s how it went last night. From the top of the falls, I followed the stream uphill, climbing through the shadows and the moonlight toward the place among the rocks where we’d found Kimberly on the day I think of as “the last stand.”

I wanted to see where it had happened.

That would be the best place to start my search.

The Calm Before the Storm

Before I go on with the rest of what happened last night, I’d better tell what happened to me and the women at the chasm. Last night will make more sense that way.

When I left off, we were wading upstream, Connie in the lead. Earlier, Kimberly had run away from us on the beach. She was afraid we might try to tone down her vengeance, so she wanted a crack at Wesley without us.

We were afraid that, going after him alone, she might get herself killed.

We hurried up the stream. Though we splashed quite a bit, we didn’t speak.

Connie and I slapped mosquitoes, now and then. They weren’t as bad as they’d been on the day we made our first trip to the lagoon, but plenty of them buzzed around us and settled on us and sucked our blood and tickled, so we both worked at smacking them flat. (The critters didn’t bother Billie, of course. My theory is that they didn’t want to spoil her fabulous body by marking it with little red bumps.) Anyway, we waded up the stream at a good, quick pace, and didn’t speak at all for quite a while. We were afraid of giving away our position. None of us, I think, looked forward to a premature encounter with the enemy. If it came to a fight, we wanted Kimberly to be with us.

About halfway to our destination, though, Billie broke into song.

“Once jol-ly swagman… !”

Connie twisted around. “Mom!”

“What?”

“Shhhh!!!!”

“Let’s all sing,” Billie suggested.

Connie’s attitude had improved so much that she didn’t blurt out, “Fuck you!” Instead, she asked, “What on earth for?”

“It’s a great day for singing.” Billie looked over her shoulder at me, and smiled. “Don’t you think so, Rupert?”

“They’ll hear us,” I said, and whacked my neck to mash a mosquito.

That’s the idea,” she said. “Let’s get their attention, if we don’t already have it.”

Connie lifted her eyebrows. “So they’ll worry about us instead of Kimberly?”

“Exactly,” Billie said. “It might not even occur to them that Kimberly isn’t with us.”

“As long as they don’t see us,” I added.

Billie grinned. “If they’re busy watching us, they aren’t watching Kimberly.”

“Okay,” I said. “But we’d better be ready for them.”

“What the hell,” Connie said.

“Let’s do it,” said Billie.

Off we went, marching up the stream, the three of us singing “Waltzing Matilda” at the top of our lungs. Billie and Connie seemed to know the lyrics by heart—Andrew, the Navy lifer, had probably learned the song on shore leave in Australia, or something, and taught it to them. I knew most of the words, myself. (I’ve made it a point, since I was a little kid, to memorize song lyrics, poems, all sorts of quotes that impress me.) We sounded damn good, bellowing it out.

Even though the song is mostly about death and ghosts, it’s so jaunty that I felt great singing it.

We were flaunting ourselves, taunting Wesley and Thelma if they were near enough to hear our cheerfully defiant marching song.

After “Waltzing Matilda,” we sang “Hit the Road, Jack.” I didn’t know the words at first, but caught on after listening to Billie and Connie. Then we sang, “Hey, Jude,” which we all knew most of the words to.

For our next song, I suggested, “We’re off to See the Wizard.”

Billie laughed. “Oh, that’s rich.” Rich, mostly, because I was lugging an ax. “You make a cute Tin Woodsman,” she said. “Ill be the Cowardly Lion.”

Cute. She’d called me cute.

“Gimme a break,” Connie said. “We’re choosing parts? What does that leave me, the Scarecrow? Fat chance. What was he looking for, a brain? Thanks, but no thanks.”

“You can be Dorothy,” I told her, smiling.

“What if I don’t want to be Dorothy? Dorothy’s a woos.”

“That leaves Toto,” Billie said.

“A dog. Thanks a heap, Mother. If we’re gonna sing the damn song, let’s just get on with it, okay? You guys can pretend to be whoever you want, just include me out.”

“Party pooper,” Billie said.

“You and the horse you rode in on.”

“Cowardly Lions don’t ride horses,” I pointed out.

Connie gave me a narrow look, then smiled. “And doughnut holes don’t fly,” she said, “but maybe you can take a leap at one, anyway.”

“Let’s sing,” Billie said.

Without any more discussion, we started in on “The Wizard of Oz.”

Turned out, none of us knew the words very well. We made an energetic botch of the song, then quit when we reached the flat, slanting rock just below the lagoon.

This time, nobody went sneaking up the rock to take a look around. Connie leading the way, the three of us climbed its face. We stood at the top in full view of anyone who might be watching.

We saw nobody.

“Now what?” Connie whispered.

“Kimberly was planning to come in from the rear,” Billie said. “She’ll probably be over on the other side.”

“Somewhere upstream,” I added.

“So I guess we swim across,” Billie said.

“Not me,” I said. “I can’t swim anywhere with this ax.”

“Leave it here?” Billie asked.

“Somebody might swipe it. Besides, what if we need it?”

“Guess you’re right,” she said. “Maybe we’d better walk around to the other side.”

I expected Connie to say, “Be my guest,” then dive in and swim across. I wouldn’t have blamed her, either. I wanted to dive in. The water looked wonderful. Also, it would’ve been very soothing on our mosquito bites.

Connie surprised me, saying, “I’ll go first.” Then she turned to the left and began to make her way along the shoreline. Billie followed her, and I took up the rear.

It wasn’t easy going. A lot of climbing. A lot of ducking under branches. A lot of squeezing through tight places. A lot of tricky footwork, crossing ledges and steep slopes and deadfalls. A lot of huffing and sweating.

I felt responsible. After a while, I said, “Are you two sure you wouldn’t rather go on and swim across? I can meet you on the other side.”

“This is the last place we oughta start splitting up,” Billie said.

“You got a death wish?” Connie asked me.

“I just feel bad about making you do this.”

“You’re doing us the favor,” Billie said. “Hell, you’re hauling around our major piece of weaponry.”

She was right about that.

And very sweet to point it out.

They both seemed to accept this rough haul as an unavoidable part of our mission to hook up with Kimberly, and didn’t blame me.

We stayed as close as possible to the water. That way, we had a good view of the lagoon and most of the opposite shore, including the waterfall. We kept our eyes open for Kimberly. And we watched for any signs of Wesley or Thelma.

Being at the rear, I watched our backs.

I couldn’t help, from time to time, also watching the backs of Billie and Connie.

Billie’s close-cropped hair, dripping with sweat, clung to her head in dark ringlets. Her back, richly dark from the sun (sunblock only goes so far), gleamed as if she’d been dipped in melted butter. Her back was crossed by the single rope of her tomahawk sling, and by the three coils of the long rope. The tomahawk bounced and swayed against her right hip as she walked. The seat of her black bikini pants was packed with her full, firm buttocks. I remember thinking, as I followed her, how I would’ve loved to see her wearing a thong like Connie’s.

As for Connie, her short, blond hair looked almost exactly like her mother’s. But that’s where the resemblances stopped. She didn’t have the broad shoulders, the wide back, or the impressive hips and rump. From behind, she looked like skin and bones while her mother looked like flesh and blood.

She wore the towel-vest, which covered most of her back. Below the rear of the vest, she was naked except for a waistband and a strip of orange fabric that descended (and very nearly vanished) between her buttocks. Her cheeks were brown and shiny, but had a few red bumps from the mosquitoes.

Both women were wonderful to watch.

For about an hour, I worked my way along behind them, struggling with the weight of the ax, keeping an eye out for trouble, and for Kimberly, and savoring my views of Billie and Connie.

I’m glad that I didn’t try to be a perfect gentleman and avoid looking at them; pretty soon they would be gone and I might never have another chance to see them.

I didn’t know that at the time.

I only knew that we were together on a mission, that I could admire them from behind to my heart’s content, that I loved them both, and that this was one of those few, special times I would always look back on with fondness and sorrow.

The great times are often that way.

In the middle of everything, you suddenly realize that you’re having a perfect, golden experience. And you realize how few they are. And how this one is bound to end too soon. You know that it will always be a wonderful memory, that the loss of it will give you a soft ache in the heart.

This was one of those times.

It had begun, I realize now, with “Waltzing Matilda.”

It ended upstream, in the rocks beyond the lagoon, at the edge of the chasm.

By the time we reached the other side of the lagoon, we were drenched with sweat and gasping for breath. Instead of pausing to rest, however, we climbed the rocks alongside the waterfall.

We no sooner reached the top than Kimberly shouted, “Over here!”

We spotted her standing on a boulder by the side of the stream, waving her arms back and forth. She was uphill from us, about a hundred feet away. Her spear leaned against the boulder, close enough for her to crouch and grab in case of an emergency. But if she fell on it…

The idea made me grimace.

While we approached her, she climbed down.

Didn’t fall and get skewered.

Scooted on her rump down the face of the rock, then jumped to the ground.

“Was that you guys singing?” she asked.

“Who else would it be?” Connie said.

She smiled. “I couldn’t believe my ears. You’re coming to my rescue belting out songs?”

“You obviously didn’t require rescuing,” Billie said.

“It’s the thought that counts.”

“We would’ve sung ‘The Gary Owen,’ I told her, “but I don’t know the words.”

“The Gary what?” Connie asked.

Kimberly wrinkled her nose. “Is that the Seventh Cavalry song?” she asked.

“Right.” I hummed a few bars.

Billie grinned. She said, “Ah, John Wayne.”

“George Armstrong Custer,” I said.

“That would’ve been choice,” Kimberly said.

“You being part Sioux, and all…”

“Anyway, I’m glad you came.”

“We thought you might be able to use some help,” Billie told her. “Even if you didn’t want us getting in your way.”

“Hey, I’m sorry about that. I got a little carried away down there. Anyway, as it turns out, you don’t have to worry about me going nuts and torturing the hell out of Wesley. The bastard’s dead.”

“Whoa!” Connie said. (I think she meant it to mean, “Wow!")

“You found him?” I asked.

She nodded. “Let’s go. I’ll show you.” She started leading us through the strange terrain to the right of the stream.

“What about Thelma?” Billie asked.

“No sign of her. But at least we don’t have to worry about Wesley anymore.”

We followed Kimberly on a zigzag route through a maze of boulders, bushes, trees, and rock piles that jutted up like miniature mountains. Though we walked through patches of shadows, there was more sunlight than we’d seen since the beach. A gentle breeze blew. It cooled my sweat, and kept the mosquitoes away.

“He’s through here?” Connie asked. “How did you ever find him?”

“Took a while. This is upstream from the falls, like Thelma said. “

“But conveniently close to the falls and lagoon,” I pointed out.

“Yep. To me, it seemed like just exactly the right sort of area. You could hide an army through here. So I scouted around for a while. I climbed that.” She pointed at a tall cluster of rocks, not far ahead of us.

“You must’ve been here a while,” Billie said.

“I hurried. I was pretty sure you guys would come after me, sooner or later, and I wanted a chance to find Wesley before you got here. Thought I’d find him alive.”

“That’s what we were afraid of,” Connie told her. “That’s how come we tried to hurry.”

“What took you so long?”

“We had to go around the lagoon,” I explained. “We couldn’t swim across because of the ax.”

“I’m glad you showed up when you did.” She smiled. “Better late than never.” She seemed quite cheerful. “Anyway, I was up there when I spotted something that looked like a pair of red panties on the ground. I figured they must be Thelma’s. So what I did, I climbed down and went over to check them out. They were right by the edge of a chasm. I sort of peered over the edge, and there he was, down at the bottom. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was Wesley, all right.”

“And he’s definitely dead?” I asked.

“I’d say so. You’ll see.”

“So,” Connie said, “now we only have to worry about Thelma.” She glanced nervously at several nearby places where the gal might be lurking.

Billie said, “Don’t worry. She isn’t likely to jump all four of us.”

“I can’t figure her out,” Kimberly said. “Looks like she told us the truth, after all, about killing Wesley. His head’s bashed in, just like she said. So how come she went for Rupert with the razor? I mean, we figured Wesley must’ve sent her. That idea doesn’t quite work anymore.”

“She must’ve had some other reason,” Billie suggested.

“You try putting moves on her?” Connie asked me.

I blushed and blurted, “No!”

Connie smirked. “Not your type?”

“Not even close.”

“She must’ve had some kind of reason,” Billie said, frowning slightly as if puzzled.

Kimberly smiled. “We’ll just have to ask her when she shows up.”

“I’m hoping she doesn’t,” I said. “If I never see her again in my whole life, it won’t be too soon.”

“She’ll show up.”

“What makes you so sure?” I asked.

“You’ve got her favorite razor.” As Kimberly said that, she gave me a look and a smile that not only let me know she was kidding around, but somehow made me feel as if everything would turn out fine and dandy.

God, how I would love to see that look again, that smile.

Nevermore.

I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t give up hope. Not till I’ve seen her dead body with my own eyes. And even that might not make anything certain.

Plenty around here is not what it seems to be.

I’ve started drifting again. Procrastinating. The problem is, I just don’t want to tell about what’s coming. I’ve got to, though.

The Last Stand

We arrived at the chasm.

Maybe “chasm” isn’t the best word to describe it—this wasn’t the Grand Canyon. It was actually a long, narrow space between a couple of neighboring rock formations. I would guess it was thirty feet long, and about six or eight feet from edge to edge at the place where we were approaching it. At one end, the gap narrowed down to nothing. At the other end, it stopped at the open air of a drop-off.

Striding toward the gap, Kimberly tossed her spear to the ground and rid herself of the tomahawk. She didn’t halt, though, until she reached the very edge. There, she bent over as if taking a bow, and planted her hands on her knees.

The rest of us held back.

“He’s down there?” Connie asked.

“Yep. Come and take a look.”

“I’d just as soon not, if it’s all the same.”

Kimberly straightened up. Swiveling at the hips, she looked back at us. “Doesn’t anyone want to see him?”

I raised my hand.

“Well, come on over here.”

“I’ll hold the ax for you,” Billie told me, so I gave it to her.

Then I forced myself to step forward. The last thing I really wanted was to look at another dead guy. God knows, two were more than enough. But I needed to see for myself that Wesley was down there, and that he wasn’t alive.

I couldn’t force myself to walk all the way to the edge, as Kimberly had done. When I got close to it, I went down on all fours. I crawled the rest of the way.

The chasm wasn’t nearly as deep as I’d feared.

Deep enough, though. Fifteen or twenty feet, probably, with very steep walls on both sides. The bottom looked like a flat but slightly tilted slab of rock. A few bushes sprouted here and there out of crevices in the walls and floor.

The whole time I was busy inspecting the dimensions and general appearance of the chasm, I was trying not to see the body.

It was just to the left down there.

I kept seeing it in my peripheral vision while I studied everything except the body.

I finally had to look, though.

He was sprawled face down. At first glance, he might’ve been a guy who’d drifted off to sleep while doing a bit of nude sunbathing. But his skin was a bad color. And he had a hole in his ass where there shouldn’t be one—in the middle of his right buttock. And the back of his head was a ruin of mashed, black mush. Also, his left leg showed a lot of bone from the knee down; some sort of animal must’ve been working on it—an animal a lot larger than the ones I saw crawling on him and buzzing over him.

“You don’t get much deader than that,” Kimberly said. She was by my side, bent over, her hair hanging down so I couldn’t see her face. It’s just as well that her face was out of sight. It must’ve worn a look of delight. Because that’s what I heard in her voice. “There’s a fine example of what we call ‘dead meat,’” she said.

“Guess so,” I muttered, unable to work up much enthusiasm.

When she stepped back, I crawled away from the edge and stood up.

“Nobody else interested?” she asked, and took off Keith’s shirt as she walked over to where she’d left her tomahawk and spear.

“I can live without seeing him,” Billie said.

“Let me have your rope,” Kimberly said.

Billie frowned. “What for?”

“I’m going down.”

“You’re kidding,” I muttered. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Sure I do.” Kimberly had never seemed so perky. It was scary. “Have to make sure it’s him.”

“Of course it’s him. Who else could it be?”

“Gilligan?” she suggested. “The professor? D.B. Cooper? Who knows? Could be almost anyone.”

“It’s Wesley,” I said.

Connie scowled at her. “You told us it’s Wesley.”

“I’m sure it is him. I’m just not sure sure. That’s why I need to go down and turn him over.”

Turn him over?

“Oh jeez,” I said. “Don’t. You don’t want to touch him.”

She gave me a strange smile and said, “Sure I do.”

“Be my guest,” Billie said. Nose wrinkled, she lifted the coils of rope off her shoulder and swung them over her head. She held them out to Kimberly, who took them.

“There’s really no reason to go down there,” I protested. “Really. I mean, you know and I know that it’s Wesley, so…”

“Maybe you know, bucko.”

“You know, too.”

“I know no such thing.”

“It’s not funny!”

“Am I being funny?”

“You’re being strange.”

“He’s right,” Connie said.

“How about we just call it quits and go back to the beach,” Billie suggested.

The quirky grin vanished from Kimberly’s face. “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. What I’m gonna do is go down and pay a visit to our dead friend because if he’s not Wesley I wanta know it and if he is Wesley…” She shrugged.

“What?” Billie asked.

“Nothing. I just have to know for sure it’s him. That’s all. You know what? I’m not so sure, anymore. The more I think about it, the more this guy doesn’t look big enough to be Wesley.”

“That’s a crock,” I said.

Without another word, Billie walked to the edge and peered down. Then she made a sound. “Uhhh.” After about a minute, she turned around and came back to us. She looked ill. “It’s gotta be Wesley,” she muttered. “Who else could it be? Anyway, I think people are supposed to look smaller when they’re dead.”

“You think he looks smaller?” Connie blurted.

“Well… sort of. Wesley was a pretty big guy…”

“The dead guy’s big,” I pointed out.

“I’m not sure he’s as big.”

Connie muttered, “Jesus.”

“He’s got Kimberly’s spear hole in his ass,” I said. “And his head’s caved in, just the way Thelma…”

“Making him conveniently difficult to identify,” Kimberly said. “And anybody could’ve poked a hole in someone’s butt.”

“In whose butt?” I blurted. “Who else is there?”

Kimberly’s smile returned. Not her spectacular smile—her bizarre and gleeful one. “Remains to be seen, Watson.”

With that, she twirled around and made her spritely way to the edge of the chasm. Holding one end of the rope, she let the rest of it fall over the edge. Then she faced us and shook her head. “Not long enough. We’ll have to add on the tomahawk ropes.”

By that time, we were all ready to cooperate. We hadn’t had much faith in Kimberly’s judgment, but Billie’s doubts had turned the trick. She wasn’t one hundred per cent sure the body belonged to Wesley, so we really needed to make an absolutely positive ID.

While I stood guard with the ax, the women took apart their tomahawk slings.

Billie tied the knots. The three shorter pieces added at least twelve feet to the length of the rope.

Kimberly held one end and tossed the rest of it over the edge. “Reaches,” she announced.

I looked around for a good place to tie off the upper end. A tree trunk, for instance. Or a solid jut of rock. There was nothing of the sort near enough to the edge. “I guess we’ll have to lower you,” I said.

“Nope. I’ll just climb down.”

Apparently, she’d already figured out what to do. She took the ax from me, carried it toward the edge, and turned the ax so its haft pointed away from the chasm. Then she squatted and shoved the blade into a crack in the rocks. Standing up, she stomped it deeper.

She tied a loop at her end of the rope and slipped it down the haft until it stopped against the steel head.

“That should do it,” she said. “Rupe, how about hanging on to the ax handle? Just keep it pushed down, and try not to let the head pop out of the crack.”

I nodded. “Okay, but…”

“Or stand on the ax. Whatever.”

“Okay.” Crouching, I clutched the wooden handle just below the loop of rope. “Got it,” I said.

“Good guy,” she said. She gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze, then moved around in front of me. Briefly, we were forehead to forehead. Then she crawled backward, the rope on the ground between her knees.

“Be careful,” Billie said.

“For Godsake, don’t fall,” Connie said.

They both moved in closer. Billie stood near my left side, while Connie sank down to one knee on my right. They were ready to help if anything should go wrong.

So far, Kimberly hadn’t even taken hold of the rope. Hands pressed against the edge of the chasm, she lowered her legs. Then she stopped. She held herself there, braced up with stiff arms in front of me, the ledge pushing a long dent across both her thighs. Her shoulders and arms, usually so slender and smooth, bulged with curves of muscle. So did her breasts. They swelled, smooth and round, ballooning the pouches of her white bikini. Her dark skin dripped sweat and glistened.

“Rupe,” she said.

I met her eyes.

“I’m gonna lose my knife.”

I looked at it.

I’d been trying to avoid looking there.

As usual, the Swiss Army knife was tucked in between her bare skin and waistband at the very front of her bikini pants. Its top end stuck up more than usual—about half an inch. The thickness of the handle held the pants away from her body, and made a bulge all the way down.

I saw her problem right away; if she tried to lower herself any further, the rock ledge would push at the bottom end of the knife, thrusting it up and out.

“Take it,” she said.

“Uh…”

She sort of rolled her eyes upward. “Just do it. Please.”

“I’ll get it,” Connie said, sounding annoyed. Up on one knee, though, she was too far away. She started to put her other knee down.

“Never mind,” I said. Leaning over the ax, I planted my left hand on the ground to hold myself steady while I reached for the knife with my right hand.

I found myself gazing nearly straight down into wedges of open space on either side of the knife handle. Twin triangles formed by red plastic, white spandex, and bare skin. Smooth, flawless, private skin and curls of black hair.

The view sucked my breath out, made my heart start to slam, and sent a quick surge through my groin. I grew hard as I reached down to rescue the knife.

I tried to pinch the tip of the handle where it jutted out above her waistband.

Not enough there to get a firm grip on.

So I slipped my thumb and forefinger down inside. By accident, they brushed ever so softly against her skin. I felt the smoothness, and moaned. I murmured, “Sorry,” in a shaky voice.

I was taking too long.

I squeezed the sides of the handle between my thumb and forefinger, and slowly lifted. The knife slid upward. I could feel the tightness of it, trapped like it was. But it came up smoothly. When it was nearly all the way out, I stole a glimpse down deep inside the gaping front of her pants.

Then the elastic snapped back. Her pants shut like a mouth.

“Got it,” I murmured.

“Thanks,” Kimberly said.

Thank you, I thought. Didn’t say it, though.

I raised my head and forced a smile. The look she gave me, she knew what had happened. She’d intended it. Or maybe I just read that into her look, and all she’d really intended was to have me stop the knife from falling out. Who knows?

“If you need any help down there…” I said. The words were out before I realized they could be taken in a couple of different ways.

I expected Connie to pop out with a nasty crack. She didn’t, though.

Kimberly said, “I might want you to lower the knife to me. We’ll see.”

“Sure. Just let me know.”

She bent her arms. The stone edge rubbed its way up her thighs, her groin and belly. Propped up on her elbows, she grabbed the rope with one hand.

I took my position beside the ax. Keeping the knife snug inside my right hand, I held the ax handle down with my left. By the time I looked at Kimberly again, only the top of her head showed. A moment later, it vanished below the rim.

With Kimberly out of view, I focused on the ax and the rope. They looked fine. The ax seemed to be solidly planted in the crack. The rope, taut and stiff, vibrated slightly.

Connie was still beside me on one knee.

Billie still stood near the edge, watching Kimberly’s descent.

Someone yelled “YAHHHHHH!”

The noise of it almost stopped my heart. For an instant, I thought Kimberly’d fallen. The yell didn’t sound like her voice, though.

Sounded like a man’s voice.

I raised my head.

He came at us from the other side of the chasm, yelling as he charged. He didn’t look like Wesley. He was Wesley, though. And he was bigger than the guy in the chasm.

Even though I only saw him for a few seconds, I remember every detail as if I’d snapped a photo of him. Or caught him on videotape, to be more accurate—they’re moving pictures. Often, I see them in slow motion.

Somewhere, Wesley had gotten hold of a blue cap. He wore it backward, the plastic adjustable tabs across the middle of his forehead so he looked like some sort of fat, white gangsta rapper.

He also wore Thelma’s large, red brassiere. He seemed to be using it as a harness to hold a bandage in place against his left boob; the red cup on that side was stuffed to bulging. The right cup had been cut away, so his hairy tit bulged out through the frame, bouncing and flopping as he dashed toward the chasm.

Since the night of the ambush—the last time I’d seen Wesley—he had also found a leather belt. If he’d come upon a pair of pants to go with it, though, he’d chosen to go without. He wore the belt around his waist, and hunting knives in leather sheaths at each hip.

On his feet, he wore a pair of high-topped sneakers.

He wore nothing else except his own sweat, hair, and hard-on.

He was pretty damn funny-looking, in a way.

But there wasn’t much amusing about how he ran at us yelling like a madman and waving machetes overhead with both hands.

Even though I’m able to see him in slow motion, everything actually happened very fast. He had almost reached the far edge of the chasm by the time I raised my head and saw him coming.

Connie made a squeaky little noise.

Billie let out a loud gasp.

Wesley was in mid-leap before any of us started to move. Connie started trying to get off her knee. Billie began to turn and take a step backward. On my knees, I opened my hand and glanced down at the shiny red plastic handle of the Swiss Army knife, the silvery edges of the blades and tools that were safely folded away.

No chance of getting a blade out in time.

I started trying to get off my knees.

Billie, glancing over her shoulder, flinched and gaped. Her arms began to rise as she continued to twist around. Something about her expression and posture reminded me of a football player lunging for an interception.

In that instant, I knew Thelma must be attacking from the rear.

I heard Wesley’s sneaker whap close by. Still in a crouch, I turned my head and glimpsed him on our side of the chasm—but not directly in front of me. Off a bit to my right. Charging straight at Connie.

I tried to stand up faster.

Connie had managed to get up. She was in the midst of turning her back to him, flinging her arms forward as if reaching for help.

That’s where it stops.

That’s all I remember about our “last stand.”

Just at that point, I imagine, Thelma must’ve nailed me from behind.

Perchance to Dream

Here’s my guess. While I was out cold from a blow to the head, someone “disposed” of me.

That is, threw or shoved me over the edge of the chasm.

My guess is also that the fall didn’t finish me off because I landed on the dead guy.

Lucky me.

My buddy, Matt.

Short for Mattress.

I slept on him for a long time, in a condition known as “dead to the world.”

What’s the difference, I wonder, between being in a coma and simply being knocked out cold? Just that one lasts longer? I don’t know, and it doesn’t much matter.

At some point, I “came to” in the night.

I opened my eyes, saw a starry sky above me, wondered vaguely where I was, decided I must be on a camping trip, then faded out again.

I came to again with the sun baking me. I wished someone would make the sun go away; it felt way too hot, and made my head throb. Then the sun went away and stopped bothering me.

Bugs bothered me, off and on. Mostly, I ignored them.

Sometimes, I found myself enjoying how they tickled.

I must’ve had a hundred dreams. I could write to the last page of this notebook, and not be able to finish describing all the dreams that rambled through my sore head (many of which I’d like to forget, but can’t) while I was sprawled there at the bottom of the chasm.

They were much more vivid and realistic than regular dreams.

Some of them were extremely erotic. Those mostly featured Kimberly, but I had some doozies with Billie and Connie, along with various combinations of the three.

Thelma found her way into some of my dreams. Those were usually sexy, but in a nightmarish way. Often her razor played a part. The Thelma dreams were really sick and perverted and repulsive.

The same goes for most of my other nightmares.

Horrible.

In one, for example, I was climbing the tree to cut down Keith’s body after he’d been hanged. Which was lousy enough in real life. In my dream, though, it got worse. He suddenly swung toward me by his neck and embraced me—wrapped his arms and legs around me—and started to chew off my nose.

That one was nasty, but brief.

I had several nightmares that seemed endless.

Of those, one that I remember vividly involved a group of women who came walking up the beach toward me on a beautiful, sunny day. I didn’t know who they were at first. For one thing, they were naked so I couldn’t tell them apart by what they wore. For another, they didn’t have their heads. Their necks ended at pulpy, bloodless stumps.

I was pretty turned on, but also spooked.

They said I could save them, if I wanted to badly enough. (This in spite of having no heads.) I was eager to save them, and asked how. They said, “You have to match us up.”

That’s when I realized that each woman was holding something out of sight behind her back.

They brought their arms around to the front.

Each woman was carrying a head.

Among the heads, I recognized the faces of Connie, Billie, Kimberly, Thelma, Wesley, Miss Curtis (my fifth-grade teacher whom I’d had a terrible crush on), Ardeth Swan (a girlfriend from high school—never got to first base with her), and a total stranger (I think) who looked sort of cute except for all the rings and bolts and pins sticking out all over her face and ears.

The last head belonged to my own mother. God knows what it was doing there, but it sure added to the creepy weirdness of the nightmare.

Right off the bat, it was clear to me that none of the ladies was holding on to her own head.

Wesley’s head explained the rules of the game. “If you wanta save us, you’ve gotta match up our heads correctly before sundown. Think you can do that, little buddy?”

“I wouldn’t save you if I could,” I told him.

Besides, Wesley’s body wasn’t even there. Of the nine decapitated bodies standing in front of me on the beach, each and every one appeared to be a properly equipped female.

I took Wesley’s noggin out of the hands of a heavy-set gal, and tossed it down the beach. Then I rushed over to Thelma’s head, plucked it out of the hands of a slim gal I suspected of being Connie, and hurried with it over to the stocky gal who’d been holding Wesley’s head. I plonked it down on her neck stub.

Thelma, now properly assembled, smiled and wiggled her fingers at me.

I won’t go through the whole nightmare. I don’t want to even think about some of what happened, much less write it down. So I’ll skip the worst parts, and just tell about the stuff that isn’t quite as disturbing.

Through the whole dream, whether I was laughing or feeling horny or confused or disgusted or terrified, I always had this terrible, heavy feeling of dread. Nobody’d explained what would happen if I flailed to match the heads correctly with the bodies before sundown—aside from the obvious, that I wouldn’t “save” the women. But I had a feeling that my fate might be something too creepy for words.

Sundown was fast approaching.

So I raced back and forth, snatching heads out of hands, rushing this way and that, shoving them down onto neck stubs.

It wasn’t as simple as it might sound.

I’d taken care of Wesley and Thelma right off the bat. Two down, seven to go. I’d seen enough of Connie and Kimberly to recognize their bodies, so they presented no problem (except when I dropped Connie’s head and it rolled away and I had to chase it down the beach). Four down, five to go.

I tried to do Billie next, figuring she’d be a cinch. After all, she’d been running around forever in nothing but her bikini, and I’d seen her breasts completely naked the night she tried to tackle Thelma but ended up diving through the sand. (I remembered, even in my dream, about how they’d looked looming out loose over her bikini top.) I grabbed Billie’s head from the hands of a body I didn’t recognize, then hurried it over to the broad, lush figure I knew to be her.

When I plonked it onto the neck, Billie’s mouth said, “Dumb move, Rupert. You don’t know your own mother when you see her?”

Yuck!

Down the line, I spotted an identical body.

To me, they both looked like Billie.

Whoa, Nelly. Here comes Freud, Oedipus leering by his side.

The hell with it. This is no time to start worrying about what might be lurking in my subconscious. Screw id.

Anyway, I was shocked by that part of the dream, but the mistake had a silver lining. I quickly matched two heads to the proper bodies: Billie’s and my mother’s.

Next, I went for the head of the stranger.

Its ears, nostrils, lips, and even eyebrows bristled with all manner of metallic ornaments. I took her head out of Kimberly’s hands and rushed it down the row of ladies to a pale, skinny gal who had rings dangling from her pierced nipples, clitoris, etc. Easy.

That done, only two heads remained.

My cute blonde fifth-grade teacher, Miss Curtis. And my high-school girlfriend, Ardeth Swan.

Unfortunately, three headless bodies remained.

That’s because my first move of the game had been tossing away Wesley’s head.

It wouldn’t have matched any of the three remaining bodies, anyway.

Off on the horizon, the sun was sinking slowly into the sea.

Miss Curtis and Ardeth gave me no trouble.

Miss Curtis had a petite, slender body with a nice tan, cup-sized breasts with turgid dark nipples, and a shiny tuft of blond hair between her legs.

Ardeth Swan, a freckled and pimply tub, had lost her head but not her modesty. She kept an arm across her huge breasts, a hand clamped to her crotch.

When I put Miss Curtis’s head on her neck, she gave me a warm smile and said, “You always were such a fine young man, Thomas.”

I didn’t know who the hell Thomas might be, but I thanked her anyway.

After returning Ardeth’s head, I simply smiled at her. She said, “Fuck off, meatball.”

Even in my nightmares…

Only a small curve of orange sun remained above the horizon.

I faced the final headless body.

I had no head to give it.

Thinking I might spot a head I’d missed, I looked around.

Everyone had vanished.

Everyone was gone except me and the lone, headless woman. We stood close together on the empty beach, facing each other. (She wasn’t “facing” me, of course, as she didn’t possess one.)

What she did possess was an absolutely fabulous, incredible body.

Her skin gleamed all over with a tawny, golden tan.

She was at least six feet tall, from neck to toe. She had long, slender arms and legs, broad shoulders, breasts that were high firm mounds with stiff jutting nipples. Her hips were wide and smooth, her belly flat. Lower, she had a glossy curve without so much as a trace of whiskers—as if she’d never grown any hair at all down there.

“I don’t know what to do,” I told her. “I’m out of heads.”

She shrugged her shoulders, which made her breasts lift and descend wonderfully.

“Do you know where your head is?” I asked her.

Again, that lovely shrug.

I checked the horizon and saw the last sliver of the sun easing out of sight.

Fast as I could, I snatched off my own head and shoved it onto her neck.

“There!” I yelled in triumph.

The yell didn’t come from my mouth, though. I was looking at my mouth, my face, my head, on top of that gorgeous body.

Not a match!

In my haste to provide a head for her, I’d forgotten that the rules called for a match.

Not just any old head would do.

But mine did!

Figure that one out.

Anyway, I watched my own face give me a very nice, friendly smile.

Then my dream woman said, “Thanks, Rupert.” (Not my voice, I’m glad to report. It sounded more like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, and a lot like Billie.) “You won,” she told me. “You saved us all, do you know that? You should be very proud of yourself.”

It made me feel really good.

“Of course,” she said, “now you don’t have a head.”

“Oh, that’s okay.” I can be quite the gallant fellow, sometimes. “I don’t need it that much,” I told her. “I’m just glad I was able to match everyone up.”

“Do you know what you get for winning?”

I shook my head. (Well, maybe not. I thought I did, though.)

“You get me,” she said.

“Oh boy!” I said.

She came forward. She took me in her arms, and I felt her body against me. Unfortunately, she had my face. When she tried to kiss me, I turned away.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know about this. I don’t think I wanta be kissing my own face.”

“Okay. That can be fixed. Whose do you want?”

“You can change your face?”

I watched myself give me a knowing smile. “Sure. Just tell me who you want me to be.”

“Yourself,” I said.

“I am myself. I’m your dream lover. I’m whoever you want me to be.”

“I sure don’t want you being me.”

“Who, then?” she asked.

“Can it be anyone?”

“Anyone you’d like.”

“How about Kimberly?”

“Excellent choice,” she said. Immediately, the face of my dream lover stopped being me and became Kimberly.

Then things really sizzled.

Somewhere along the way, my nightmare had gotten left behind, leaving me with a fantastic erotic dream. Probably the best dream I’ve ever had.

It stayed great, too. The worst thing about it, from the moment after I saved her with the donation of my head, was when I woke up very suddenly and the dream ended.

I remembered her (Oh, God, did I ever!), but she had fled, along with my sleep, and I couldn’t bring her back.

I would gladly let myself get knocked out today, if I thought she would return.

Of all the dreams and nightmares that came to me at the bottom of the chasm, though, she only put in the one appearance.

In my last dream down there, I found myself on the beach in a wheelchair, trying to get away from someone. I couldn’t turn my head around to see who was chasing me, but I was plenty scared. I kept shoving at the wheel rims, trying to pick up speed, but the wheels were bogged down in the sand. They kept sinking deeper and deeper, until my chair wouldn’t move at all.

Finally, screaming in terror, I hurled myself out of the chair and started to run away. My legs worked fine. What the hell had I been doing in the wheelchair? Elated, I sprinted for safety. But my feet started sinking in the sand.

With each step, I sank deeper. Pretty soon, the sand reached my waist. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t wade any farther. I was trapped. It hugged me like tight, heavy trousers.

I was terrified.

Now, he’d catch me. He would come running up behind me with his ax or machete or… chainsaw.

It’ll be a chainsaw, I suddenly realized.

I couldn’t hear it, though. Not yet.

Had he given up the chase?

I listened. Ocean sounds, bird sounds, bug sounds, but no cough, sputter and roar of a chainsaw.

I smiled with relief.

All of a sudden, down deep in the sand, hands caressed my legs.

I woke up with a yell of night and a splitting headache, and that was the end of my odyssey through a hundred dreams and nightmares at the bottom of the chasm.

Some of my worst nightmares, though, were more pleasant than what I found on my return to reality.

I was sprawled on my back, my head pounding with pain. I felt as if every bone in my body had been hammered. In some places, I felt numb. In others, I itched. In still others, sharp pains stabbed me.

Above me, swarms of flies and other winged bugs zipped this way and that. Some landed on me, while others were happy to circle.

A vulture suddenly flapped up into my line of vision, startling me.

I saw the chasm walls towering above me on both sides.

The gray sky above the chasm held a promise of sunrise—or night.

Beneath me, I felt Matt.

Waking Up Is Hard to Do

Matt felt like lumpy, warm goo.

I shouldn’t complain, though. Without him, I would probably be lumpy, warm goo.

Still, he disgusted me.

I had been napping for at least a couple of days, probably longer, on top of a naked, decomposing corpse.

I, at least, wasn’t naked. Thank God I had my shorts on. Where my bare back pressed against him, we seemed to be stuck together. My skin, there, itched like crazy. Also, I felt squirming, crawling things; various critters that had apparently gotten sandwiched between us.

Let’s not dwell on all that.

I won’t even mention the smell.

The moment I realized where I was—and what was under me—I let out a cry and rolled off him.

It made quite a sound when we came unstuck. You might get a similar effect by dropping a large, hot pizza on the tile floor of your kitchen and letting it stay there for a couple of hours before you peel it off.

When you peel it off, that’s when you get the sound.

Rolling off Matt, I took some of him with me. I could feel gop and stuff glued to my back.

I started to crawl away from him. Then I threw up. Then I crawled farther. It’s a wonder I could move at all. Aside from all my other complaints, I felt like a passenger on a twilt-a-whirl. I kept crawling, though, wanting to put miles between me and Matt.

I probably made ten feet before I collapsed.

I lay there groaning, sleepless and full of agony.

The next time I lifted my head, the chasm was dark. I sat up and leaned back against a curving surface of rock.

The full moon, directly overhead, shone pale light down between the steep walls. It lit most of the chasm’s floor. Including Matt.

My silent partner.

He seemed almost like an old friend.

A long-lost buddy I might’ve shared some good times with once, but who had recently undergone some major changes for the worse—especially in the personal hygiene department.

I had no idea who he might be.

Gazing at his moonlit corpse over there, though, I found myself fancying him as an old prospector. He was Walter Huston. I was Bogart. We’d run into some tough luck—his a lot tougher than mine.

“Reckon we won’t be buying no rabbit farm, Lenny,” I said to him.

Wrong movie. Wrong characters. But it’s what I said, anyway.

“Shit happens,” I told him.

I thought about crawling over to him and taking a look at his face. For all I knew, I might recognize him.

Could he be Keith?

Maybe Wesley and Thelma had disinterred Keith, brought his body here to trick us…

No.

Matt was too large to be Keith.

He couldn’t possibly be Andrew, either. Again, wrong size. Besides, they would’ve had to fish his body out of the sea.

So who the hell was he?

Or she? Matt might be a female. After all, I’d never seen the body’s frontal areas. She couldn’t be a woman from our group, though; all of ours had been up at the top while the body was down here.

Not that I’d actually seen Thelma up there. But I figure it must’ve been Thelma who attacked us from the rear.

Anyway, Matt seemed too large to be Thelma, and his shape was all wrong.

His shape seemed wrong, in fact, to be any woman at all.

Not that he couldn’t have been one. Kimberly and Billie had looked at him, though, and they’d assumed he was a man: Wesley, in fact. Though we’d had doubts about his identity, none of us had doubted that the body was a he.

I wondered, though.

Matt was probably no Matilda, but I was curious.

Would I recognize him—or her?

Only one way to find out.

I didn’t want to move, though.

I especially didn’t want to take a good, close look at the stiff.

A. It stank.

B. His or her face was bound to be a wreck.

C. He or she was a critter magnet.

D. If I got any closer, I might start getting the creeps.

E. Or throw up again.

F. All of the above.

So I stayed put.

Then I squinted up at the top of the chasm and wondered what had happened.

Obviously, I’d been knocked out cold and dumped into the chasm. What about the women, though?

They hadn’t won the battle, that was for sure.

If they’d won, I wouldn’t have found myself waking up at the bottom of the chasm, days later, alone except for a corpse.

They would have taken care of me.

Not necessarily, I told myself.Suppose they won the fight, but only after I’d gone over the edge? Someone climbs down to check on me. Kimberly. She mistakes me for dead, so they go off and leave me here.

That didn’t seem likely.

Not being an idiot, Kimberly would’ve noticed that I was alive.

Thinking about Kimberly, I recalled the last time I’d seen her. She had been climbing down a rope into the chasm. She’d just dropped out of sight below the edge moments before the attack came.

She wasn’t down here, now. I had already looked around. Nobody was down here except for me and the corpse. I scanned the moonlit bottom again, anyway. No sign of Kimberly, or anyone else.

She’d most likely scurried back up the rope to join the fight.

A losing fight, almost for sure.

The last I saw, Wesley had been hot on Connie’s tail. Seconds after I went down, he’d probably whacked her head off with one of those machetes. Then he and Thelma had probably made quick work of Billie.

So Kimberly, late in joining the fray, would’ve found herself standing alone against those two.

She was tough enough to win.

If she’d won, though, where was she? Why had she left me down here?

They’re dead, I thought. All of them. Kimberly, Billie and Connie. Dead.

Then I almost went nuts, but I kept a grip on one thin thread of hope: that they had somehow won the battle. They’d thought I was dead, and left me. And they’d gone on back to our camp at the beach. If I could get out of the chasm, I would find them there, alive and well.

God, they’d be so glad to see me!

Not half as glad as I’d be, though, to see them.

We would have a great celebration.

I knew they were dead.

Sometimes, though, kidding yourself isn’t the worst course of action. Instead of self-destructing, I got myself out of the chasm.

For starters, I struggled to my feet. Then I roamed back and forth, checking in the shadows and bushes to make absolutely sure that Kimberly wasn’t down here.

I found no one.

I found no heads or other parts.

I found nothing worth finding.

Not even the rope. After the end of the battle, someone must’ve pulled it up. (Why leave behind a perfectly good rope?)

Not that it would’ve done me much good. I could barely hold myself upright, much less climb out of the chasm on a rope.

I did try to climb out without one.

I never got very high, fortunately, because I kept falling.

I fell three times.

Then I made my way to the open end of the chasm.

It overlooked a steep drop-off.

I studied the situation for a minute or two. The darkness hid most of what I wanted to see. But I did notice that the treetops beyond the cliff were above me. Very encouraging: I was somewhat lower than the treetops.

A fall might not kill me.

That was about all I really cared to know.

I lowered myself over the edge.

Braced up with stiff, shaking arms, I remembered when Kimberly had paused in almost the same position and asked me to rescue her Swiss Army knife.

What had happened to the knife?

Just before being taken out of the picture, I’d seen it in my hand.

Had I somehow slipped it into a pocket of my shorts?

Not in my seat pockets, that was for sure. I’d spent plenty of time on my back and would’ve felt it pushing against my butt. It didn’t seem to be in my front pockets, either; they held the straight razor, Andrew’s lighter, Billie’s small plastic bottle of sunblock, and a pack of smoked fish. The way I was braced up against the face of the cliff, I could feel them all being pressed into my thighs.

No Swiss Army knife there. No big surprise.

Maybe the knife had ended up at the bottom of the chasm, though—If I’d still been holding on to it when I went over the edge…

I scrambled back up, got to my feet, and staggered over to the area where I had landed.

The area included Matt. Or Matilda.

Which goes to show how much I wanted the knife.

A good knife like that could make all the difference.

Also, it held memories.

I wanted it badly.

After sinking to my knees—perhaps a yard from the body—I dug Andrew’s lighter out of my pocket. I gave it a flick. A small spear-head of flame leaped from its top.

By the shimmery yellow glow, I searched the ground. Staying on my knees, I circled the area, sweeping my gaze back and forth, trying not to look at the body.

Looking at it anyway, from time to time.

After a while, you get used to anything.

Desperate to find the knife, I finally considered the possibility that the corpse might be hiding it. The knife couldn’t have fallen underneath the body, but it might’ve dropped out of sight in any of several places.

My lighter was little use on some of them.

I had to reach into the darkness under the chin and on both sides of the neck. I fingered the spaces under the armpits. I traced the entire body, crawling around it and running my fingertips along the crevice where its skin was pressed against the rock floor. I spread the legs apart and searched between them.

That’s when I confirmed that the body was not a woman, after all.

But I didn’t find the knife.

So then I turned the body over. (In for a penny, in for a pound.) As he rolled out of the way, I felt almost positive that the knife would show up, at last.

Kidding myself.

It wasn’t there, of course.

And, of course, I couldn’t stop myself from gazing at the front of the body.

The man had a pulpy ruin where his face should’ve been. Also, the left side of his chest was split open.

My guess is that Wesley and Thelma couldn’t be sure whether he would land face up or face down when they gave him the old heave-ho into the chasm. They wanted to make sure he would pass for Wesley, either way, so they didn’t spare any efforts in mutilating him.

Who was he, though? He certainly wasn’t Keith or Andrew. Where in hell had they gotten their hands on a spare man to use for their trap?

Giving up my search for Kimberly’s knife, I put away the lighter and returned to the open end of the chasm. I eased myself over the edge, and began to make my way down the sheer wall of rock.

I made it to the bottom in record time.

No bones got broken, though. Nor did I find myself unconscious. I was able to pick myself up again and get moving a few hours later, a while after the sun came up.

I found my way, without much trouble, back to the lagoon. I came upon its shoreline near the south end. After emptying my pants pockets on a rock, I took off my sneakers and socks. (How great it felt to have bare feet!) I climbed down into the water and washed my hands the best I could, then cupped water to my mouth.

Delicious!

Cool, clear water, just like the song. (Not very cool, as a matter of fact, but it tasted wonderful anyhow.)

After gulping down quite a load of it, I waded out until most of the lagoon came into sight.

Nobody else seemed to be there.

I submerged myself. The water felt like a soothing ointment on my battered, bruised and bitten skin. Staying under, I rubbed my face. I rubbed my shoulders, arms, chest, sides and belly, using my hands to wipe away the layers of filth.

Then I took off my shorts and worked for a while at scrubbing them. They certainly didn’t come clean, but I got rid of the worst of the mess. Done with them, I waded toward shore and tossed them onto the nearest rock. Waiting no longer, I bent over and rubbed all the itchy, sore, grimy places from my waist on down to my feet.

Later, I swam to the waterfall. I stood underneath it, the water splashing on my head and shoulders, running down me, spilling down me, flooding down me, washing off the last of the sweat and blood and whatever bits of Matt might still be clinging to my back.

I must’ve stood under it for half an hour.

Then I returned to the south end of the lagoon and climbed out. Nearby, I found a large slab of rock with a fairly flat surface. I crawled onto it and lay down.

I slept. If dreams came, I don’t remember them.

Later that day, I walked out onto our section of the beach.

By then, I’d stopped kidding myself; I knew the women wouldn’t be there.

The camp looked as if it hadn’t been touched since our departure, some days earlier.

The fire was dead.

But I found my book bag, opened it up, and took out my journal and one of the pens.

My journal—my only companion, now.

I sat down in the sand, crossed my legs, placed the journal on my lap, and opened it. After riffling through the great thickness of it, I came to a blank page.

I wrote, “DAY? ANYBODY’S GUESS.” I turned that page and wrote on the next, “Musings On My Return To The Journal.”

When a Body Meets a Body

It took one hell of a long rime to write all that. Yesterday morning, I started to write about my hike upstream the previous night. I was only about half done with that when I realized everything would make better sense if I went back in time and told the whole business about our “last stand.”

I can’t seem to be brief about this stuff. Next thing I know I’ll spend all day writing—and still have plenty left to go.

I haven’t been building fires since my return to the beach (trying to stay inconspicuous), so writing after dark is out of the question. I had to call it quits before I’d even gotten myself off the top of Matt.

This morning, I finished about the chasm, and brought myself back to the beach.

Now, I’m ready to tell the rest of what happened when I went upstream (two nights ago, now) to search for the women. I’d made my way about halfway through before breaking off to backtrack. But I need to get to the bad part, and get it over with, before I’m free to stop writing and do whatever comes next.

I was last seen above the waterfall, running naked through the jungle with the straight razor in my sock.

I found the place where Billie, Connie and I had joined up with Kimberly. Without her to lead the way, though, I had a difficult time finding the chasm from there. I became lost. More than once, I arrived at a boulder or tree that I recognized because I’d recently walked past it. I was roaming in circles.

It didn’t bother me. I was in no hurry to reach the chasm. I didn’t want to reach it, in fact. But the chasm (the area above it, actually) was the place where I needed to go, so I kept searching for it.

Eventually, I got there. Peering around a corner of rock, I scanned the scene of our battle.

No bodies littered the moonlit field.

I murmured, “Thank God.”

Then I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it.

I’d fully expected to find the remains of my three women on the ground near the top of the chasm. If not all of them, at least one or two.

Relief overpowered me.

The relief lasted about as long as my tears. I no sooner recovered from the crying than things came back into perspective; the absence of their bodies was an excellent sign. It didn’t, however, guarantee they were still alive.

Wesley and Thelma might’ve killed my women and dragged them away: buried them, burned them, sunk them, tossed them off a ledge, hauled them off somewhere to play nasty games with—God only knows.

Or they might’ve taken my women away alive—as prisoners.

Stepping into the open, I wondered if I might be walking into another trap. After all, this was enemy territory and we’d been ambushed here before.

I crouched, drew the razor out of my sock, and flipped open its blade. Then I made my way slowly toward the area where we’d been attacked. I crept along, turning, checking to my rear and sides, glancing in every direction.

Not far from the edge of the chasm, I found Connie’s beach-towel vest. The last time I saw her, she’d been wearing it. Now it lay crumpled in shadow beside a block of stone. I clamped the razor handle between my teeth, then crouched and picked up the vest. I spread it open and studied it. The stripes looked like different shades of gray in the moonlight.

The vest appeared to be free of blood—another good sign.

I couldn’t leave it behind. I wanted to keep my hands free, though. Wearing the vest seemed like the best solution, so I put it on.

And felt closer to Connie. As if the vest was a living part of her, keeping company with me. (This explained a lot about why Kimberly had gone around almost constantly in her dead husband’s Hawaiian shirt.) While still crouched in the place where I’d found the vest, I spotted a wadded rag and picked it up. Though it was dark with dry blood, I wasn’t alarmed. It appeared to be the piece of old T-shirt that Connie’d been using as a bandage for her shoulder. She must’ve lost it along with the vest.

I dropped it, took the razor out of my teeth, stood up and continued my search.

I probably looked like a madman, roaming through the night with my wicked straight razor—and wearing not a stitch except for the vest and one sock. A demented Crusoe. A castaway Sweeney Todd.

Anyway, I continued my search of the battlefield.

The ax and rope were gone. I found none of our makeshift spears or tomahawks, either.

Nor could I find the Swiss Army knife.

I looked very carefully for that, not only walking a grid pattern over most of the area, but getting down on all fours to study the ground in the vicinity where I’d last been holding it.

The knife wasn’t there. Except for Connie’s vest and bandage, it appeared that nothing had been left behind. Someone must’ve carried away everything that had fallen (including the women?).

I didn’t find blood on the ground, though. Which gave me more reason for hope. If Wesley had used his machete on anyone, vast quantities would’ve gotten spilled. Even though several days had gone by and I was doing my search by moonlight, a mess like that should’ve been easy to spot.

Unless someone had cleaned it up.

I pictured Thelma on her knees with a bucket and scrub brush. Ridiculous.

In some other setting, dirt and leaves might’ve been spread around to cover telltale blood. Not here, though. Most of this area was bare rock.

If blood had been spilled, much of it would’ve remained for me to find.

Nobody’d been chopped or slashed or stabbed to death, not on our field of battle.

Before leaving, I crawled to the edge of the chasm and peered down.

Nothing at the bottom except Matt.

He appeared to be on his back, the way I’d left him.

Staring up at me.

He was not staring up at me; he had no eyes. Down there after turning him over, I’d gotten a good look at his face. It had been smashed apart: nose flat, cheekbones and mouth demolished, nasty little craters where his eyes should’ve been.

But I felt him staring up at me. My skin crawled.

What if he gets up and starts climbing out?

A dumb thought, but mine.

It creeped me out plenty.

The moment I was sure that nothing new had been tossed into the chasm, I backed away from the edge.

One more quick look around the scene of our “last stand,” then I scrammed.

For a while, I couldn’t get Matt out of my head. We’d been almost like buddies when I was down at the bottom with him. But now I felt as if he hated me. Maybe because I’d gone off and left him?

I pictured his mutilated, rotten corpse scurrying up the chasm wall, coming after me.

Stupid. But you know how it is. You get some sort of spooky crap into your mind, and it’s hard to get rid of.

Trying to get away, I got lost and went in circles for a while. I half expected to rush around a boulder and bump into Matt. Didn’t happen, though. Finally, I came to the stream.

By then, I figured I’d given him the slip. (I know, I know, I’m nuts. I was spooked. So sue me.)

Anyway, I felt better and better as I followed the stream downhill toward the lagoon. An irrational relief at leaving Matt behind. More than that, though, I felt a growing sense of elation about my women.

Sure, they might be dead.

I doubted it, though.

No bodies at the scene of the fight. And no blood.

It now seemed more likely than not that they’d been taken alive.

If you take people alive, you probably want to keep them that way. Otherwise, why not just go on and kill them in the first place? Save yourself the trouble of tying them, taking them somewhere, risking an uprising or an escape.

By the time I reached the top of the waterfall, I felt certain that I would be able to find my women alive, and rescue them.

I felt great!

So great that I had an urge to leap off the falls—in spite of knowing the water at the bottom was only waist-deep.

Already wrecked enough from various plummets, I fought off the urge and made my way down to the lagoon by foot. I stopped on the flat rock by the side of the falls and made sure the razor was secure in my sock. Then I took off Connie’s towel-vest and rolled it into a bundle.

After lowering myself into the water, I raised the vest overhead with one hand. I kept it dry all the way to the other side of the lagoon. Not climbing out, I tossed it onto the same rock where I’d left my shorts, etc.

Then I spent about fifteen minutes having a very pleasant time: floating on my back, sometimes swimming, just relaxing in the smooth warmth of the water, relishing the way it slid over my body, always very aware that it was like a magic vanishing fluid: I could make parts of me, or all of me, disappear at will.

For a while, I felt as if I’d found a wonderful new home.

I would abandon our camp at the beach, and live at the lagoon.

Over near the north end, I saw a place where a slab of rock the size of a dining-room table slanted down into the water. I had probably seen it before, but paid no attention. This time, though, it caught my eye. Though the rest of the shoreline was either dark or dappled with specks of moonlight, the special rock was brightly illuminated. It must’ve been aligned perfectly with the moon and a break in the treetops. It looked pale and smooth like a patch of snow.

I wanted to climb on.

I wanted to lounge on that glowing white slab and bathe in the moonlight.

I swam most of the way over to it, then waded.

When I first started wading, the water came as high as my shoulders. With each step, the level lowered a little. It was waist-deep when I stepped into something soft and squishy that wrapped around my foot and tripped me. I fell headlong with a splash, and my foot pulled free.

Whatever had grabbed my foot, it wasn’t like anything that I’d ever stepped on before.

I didn’t know what the hell it might be.

Standing again, I turned around. Nothing to see except black water and a few shiny coins of moonlight shimmering on the surface.

I had my ideas about what had tripped me.

I needed to find out for sure.

So I took a deep breath and bent down into the water, reaching toward the bottom with both hands. At first, nothing. I walked slowly, moving my arms.

Instead of finding the thing with my hands, I bumped it with my right foot. I kept my balance, though, and didn’t fall. After coming up for air, I went down again, bending and crouching, and explored it.

A naked woman.

She was split wide open from sternum to crotch.

She had a load of stones where her guts should’ve been.

When I figured it out, I screamed or something. I’m not sure what I did, exactly, but I took in a mouthful of lagoon. I popped up choking. I would’ve screamed my head off then, except that I couldn’t breathe. I could only cough and gasp for air and cough some more.

When I was breathing again, I just stood there and shook.

I wanted to be miles away.

But how could I leave without knowing who it was?

I’d touched her enough to know that she was a woman, that she’d been gutted and stuffed with rocks—probably to keep her down. I hadn’t explored her well enough, however, to identify her.

So down I went again, quickly, before I had time to change my mind.

The first part I found was a shoulder. I held on to it with one hand, and explored with the other.

I started with her face, feeling it with my fingertips but trying to keep away from her eyes. I did not want to touch her eyes; they might be open—or gone.

Her mouth was open. I fingered her lips, touched the edges of her teeth, and tried to imagine the face that went with them. Which of the women had nice, straight teeth?

In my memory, all of them.

I ran my fingers through her hair. It felt limp and slippery and very short. Kimberly had much longer hair than this, so she was ruled out (unless someone had cut it). Thelma, Connie and Billie all wore their hair very short.

I had my hopes pinned on Thelma—though she seemed unlikely, being Wesley’s ally.

After surfacing to take another breath, I went down again.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled about touching the breasts of a corpse, but I figured the size of them would tell me plenty. So I took them in my hands. (My first time ever to actually handle bare breasts, and it has to be like this.) They were too large for Kimberly or Connie. Though big, they didn’t feel enormous like Thelma’s. They seemed to be about Billie’s size.

Billie.

God, I sure didn’t want it being her. But it had to be Billie. Nobody else had breasts the right size.

In a frenzy of despair, I went at the body with both hands. I felt her wide shoulders, and how her sides tapered in, then flared out at the hips. I felt the solid thickness of her thighs.

Not just the breasts had Billie’s shape and size.

She felt like Billie all the way up and down.

No!

I went a little nuts and straddled her and dug into her split torso with both hands and started snatching out the rocks that someone had packed in to keep her down.

Someone?

Wesley!

Wesley-fucking-Duncan Beaverton III.

How could he do it to her! How could he kill my Billie? How could he ruin her this way?

I suddenly thought, If Billie’s like this, why not the others?

Why not Kimberly and Connie? Maybe they, too, were sprawled on the bottom of the lagoon, hollowed out and stuffed with stones.

I kept digging rocks out of the woman under me.

When I ran out of breath, I flung my head up out of the water and yelled at the top of my lungs, “_Wesley! You fucking cocksucking load of shit! I’m gonna kill you! I’m gonna cut you to pieces and make you EAT ’em, you motherfucking asshole!"_

I cried while I yelled.

And I kept on yelling.

I yelled a lot of things that don’t even bear repeating.

With all the yelling and crying, I wore myself out. Finally, I quit. Then I just stood in the waist-deep water, panting for air.

It took me a long while to calm down enough to let me hold my breath and go under again.

She still held plenty of ballast.

Instead of unloading the rest of it by the handful, I crouched beside her, took her by the upper arm and the back of her thigh, and lifted.

Turned her over.

Dumped her out like a canoe.

Right away, she began to rise. I kept hold of her arm, and stood up. There were soft lapping sounds when she broke the surface. I could see, just barely, the dim, pale shape of her. In a few places, the moon put white marks on the skin of her back and rump. The patches of light scooted down her body as I floated her toward shore.

I climbed onto the tilted slab of rock.

Squatting at its edge, I lifted her by the arms. I staggered backward and dragged her up with me. She made sloshy sounds like someone rising out of a bathtub.

I let go of her arms, but stayed kneeling above her head.

The moon shone down like a spotlight onto us. A white spotlight, dimmed for gloomy atmosphere.

Bright enough, though, to let me see a few things.

She’d been beaten. Her back and buttocks were stained in places with gray blotches that appeared to be bruises. They were also criss-crossed with stripes as if she’d been whipped.

She’d also been stabbed in the back many times. Each wound was a narrow slot, more than an inch long, with puffy edges. (Probably made by a blade about the width of the knives that I’d seen on Wesley’s belt when he leaped across the chasm.) I had a difficult time finding all of them—some were hidden among the lash marks. So I crawled alongside her body, searching them out, studying and counting them.

I found eighteen stab wounds in her back.

I found none in her buttocks.

But I made a startling discovery there—something I might’ve noticed right away if my attention hadn’t been focused so completely on her injuries.

Bruises and lash-marks aside, her buttocks were the same pale shade of gray as her lower back and her thighs.

Where was her tan line?

Billie, I knew, had stark borders between her tanned skin and the parts covered by her bikini. Where she wasn’t tawny, she was as pale as milk.

With her black bikini pants gone, she would certainly look as if she’d changed into a new, white pair.

She shouldn’t be all one shade, like this.

For a few moments, I knew this wasn’t Billie. Then doubts came.

Not enough time had passed, since I’d seen her last, for her tan to fade so completely. But several days had gone by. If she’d spent them naked in the sun, the white of her buttocks might’ve darkened enough to match the rest of her.

And what about being submerged in the lagoon? Over a period of time, the water might’ve done something to her skin color.

She hadn’t been in it very long, though.

Not very long at all.

From the start, I’d been vaguely aware that she seemed to be in decent shape for a dead person. I hadn’t given the matter much thought, though, except to be thankful that she wasn’t as repulsive as she might be. That is, she didn’t feel slimy or stiff or rotten.

(Compared to Matt, she was a regular Sleeping Beauty.)

Suddenly, it dawned on me that she was extremely fresh.

I picked up one of her hands. Holding it close to my face, I studied the fingertips. They were pruned, all right. But not that much.

I compared them to my own wrinkled fingertips.

I’m no damn forensic pathologist, but it was suddenly obvious that she hadn’t been in the water for more than about an hour.

She had probably still been alive while I was above the falls trying to find our battleground.

If I hadn’t gotten lost up there (twice)…

If I hadn’t spent so much time looking around…

I might’ve returned to the lagoon in time to find her being murdered, gutted, stuffed, sunk.

Maybe I could have saved her.

Or maybe I would’ve gotten myself murdered, gutted…

Life and death, a matter of destinations and delays.

Only they don’t tell you the right or wrong place to be, or when.

I couldn’t bear the thought that I might’ve missed a chance, by such a slim margin, to save Billie’s life.

I turned the woman over.

Glimpsed the terrible chasm down the middle of her torso. Looked a bit longer at her breasts: bruises, welts, scratches, but no stab wounds. Then made myself gaze at her face.

It was gray in the moonlight, etched and pocked with black shadows.

Enough of it showed, though.

This was not Billie’s face.

This was the face of a woman I had never seen before, not even in my dreams.

I swam back to the place where I’d left my stuff, found Andrew’s lighter, and returned to the body. Kneeling by her side, I studied her by the lighter’s small, shaky flame.

She was definitely a stranger.

Physically, she bore a lot of resemblance to Billie. They seemed to be similar in age, size, build, and hair color. Even their faces had much in common. I could see that this wasn’t Billie, but it would’ve been hard to describe the differences. This woman’s face had obviously been attractive, even beautiful, before her death.

Her face, by the way, showed no signs of injury.

(Wesley hadn’t wanted to spoil her looks, more than likely—just torture and murder her.)

Before leaving, I dragged her a small distance away from the lagoon. I hid her in among some rocks—so I’d be spared the sight of her, maybe, if I should return to the lagoon in the near future.

Speculations

I’m now nearly caught up to the present. A good thing, too, because I’ve only got a few pages left in my notebook.

I’ve had plenty of time to think about things.

I think the dead woman was probably linked, somehow, to Matt. I think they lived together, here on the island, before our arrival. My guess is that they were married to each other.

Wesley murdered Matt first—probably just before Thelma came into our camp and told us she’d bashed Wesley’s brains in. He would’ve expected us to go looking for his body as soon as we heard the news, so it would’ve been in position at the bottom of the chasm on Day Six, waiting for us. That was two days before I got thrown down on top of Matt’s remains.

Wesley kept the woman alive, abusing her, and didn’t get around to killing her until shortly before I found her body in the lagoon two nights ago.

Obviously, Thelma had a hand in things, too. They’re in it together. Partners, allies, accomplices.

Some of this is just speculation, of course.

But it makes sense to me.

I wonder about a lot of things, though.

If I’m right about Matt and the woman being inhabitants of the island, did they live in a house? Is their house the place where Wesley got his hands on such things as the ax and rope?

Where is their house?

If I find it, will I also find Kimberly, Billie and Connie?

I think so.

I think so, yes. If they are still alive, I’ll probably find them at the house.

Last Words

Okay. I’m up to date with my journal, now. In fact, I’m done with it. I have no more reason to procrastinate. I can’t build my Winchester House of words; there’s no more room for words—or hardly enough to matter.

Tomorrow, I’ll set out to search for my women. I don’t expect I’ll be returning to our beach. I plan to travel light; wearing Connie’s towel-vest, Andrew’s shorts, and my own socks and shoes. I’ll carry the lighter in my pocket, of course. And I’ll take along Billie’s sun-block, mostly because it reminds me of her and it smells good. My only weapon will be Thelma’s straight razor.

I’ll take my journal with me in the book bag, along with a couple of pens that haven’t yet run out of ink (in case I should stumble upon paper but no writing implement), my swimming trunks (though I haven’t worn them since acquiring Andrew’s shorts), the pink blouse that Billie gave me (though I now prefer to wear Connie’s vest), and a few remaining items of food.

I’ll leave just about everything else behind. Including Andrew’s camera. I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t see a good reason to lug it around.

The less I have to carry, the better.

I do wish that I had something of Kimberly’s, though. Her Swiss Army knife (Andrew’s before it came into her possession) would have been a great treasure. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, though.

I have nothing of Kimberly’s to carry with me.

Only my memories of her.

With luck, though, I’ll be with all three of my women soon.

If I can find the mystery house, they’ll be nearby. I’d bet on it.

Whether or not I find them alive, I’ll take care of Wesley and Thelma.

I’ll make it hard for them, too.

Very hard.

Bet on it.

I’ll make them pay for every hurt they’ve done to my women.

Which sounds like a mean-spirited, brutal way to end my journal. But so be it.

Obviously, I’ll tell the rest of my story if I’m able. To do that, I’ll need to find a new source of paper. And I’ll have to still be alive.

Both good tricks.

So long.