Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (29 page)

Not until he had left the accursed valley and was well beyond its surrounding hills and mesas did Rowan allow his mount to slow to a walk, and then only because he realized, as reason reasserted itself by degrees, that he’d kill the animal if he didn’t allow it to rest. Even so, he wouldn’t permit himself to stop and make camp until the sun was well up over the horizon and continued to lead the horse at a walk.

Three days later he’d finally felt enough that he’d placed enough distance between himself and that damned valley to start a fire.

With time to think about what had happened to him, Rowan had decided that the spirit-talker was to blame. He’d thrown something into the fire in the hut that gave him hallucinations and made him susceptible to suggestion. He’d seen tricks like that done in traveling carnys and sideshows. Under hypnosis, a mesmerist could make you believe anything. Yeah, that was it, he thought…and thought no further because if he did, he’d be forced to remind himself that what he’d seen happen to Johnson Kent could never be explained so easy.

he money has finally run out.
It was the only thought that kept repeating itself in my tired brain.
The money has finally run out.
Crossing my arms on the bar planks in front of me, I brought my head down on them to rest, knocking over an empty glass as I did so. I heard it roll off as if from a million miles away, almost as far away as the Florida coast where I’d left behind all my dreams. As the harsh sounds of the crowded bar receded around me, my mind went back to those simpler days, days in which it was easier to imagine success as a treasure hunter scouring the Keys than it was to work toward a chemistry degree at MIT. I’d gotten a little money together and when I had the opportunity to buy myself a boat while on spring break in Miami, I took it. I was already a good diver, and with the boat it was easy to abandon myself to the carefree life of a scavenger among the Florida Keys looking for sunken artifacts and treasure from the hundreds of wrecks littering the bottom of those clear waters. But those seas were too crowded with other, larger outfits, and the only treasure I ever found was Carol, who became my unofficial partner and lover.

I felt a tightness in my loins and thought I heard a groan from my throat as I thought back to our first meeting. I had the boat anchored in shallow water off Bimini in the Ten Thousand Islands and was just getting set to squeeze into my wetsuit when I caught a glimpse of something dark moving through those crystal clear waters. At first I thought it was a shark, so graceful were its movements, but as it moved closer, I realized my mistake. At last, the figure reached the rope ladder that hung over the side of the boat and as the water poured from its visage, I saw just how wrong I’d been. It was a girl, and a mighty fine-looking one at that. Like a fool, instead of helping her up, I shaded my eyes and scanned the horizon reassuring myself that my position was far from any landfall.

“Permission to come aboard?” The words dragged my attention back to the girl. I must have mumbled permission, because all I could remember afterward was stepping back in surprise as she hauled herself up, saying, “Help me with this, will you?” I grabbed hold of her tanks as she shrugged out of them and continued to marvel as she divested herself of the rest of her rig.

At last, seeing that she wasn’t going to stop with her flippers, I finally managed to say, “Who are you? How’d you get here?” She smiled and said her name was Carol, that she was from California, but lately she’d been living in St. Pete. She’d spotted my boat from time to time in the last few weeks, noticed I was alone, and figured I might like a junior partner. By the time she’d finished speaking, she’d shed her black wetsuit like a second skin and stood unselfconsciously before me in one of the smallest bathing suits I’d ever seen. The next thing I knew, she had her arms around my neck and her lips were massaging mine. What could I say to an argument like that?

Like I said, as things turned out, she was the only thing of value I found the whole time we spent in those waters. At last I convinced myself that if we were going to strike it big, we had to move to less frequented waters. I sold the trinkets we’d found and outfitted the boat for a long voyage and, together, Carol and I crossed the Atlantic to the west African shore. It took us three years to dive and trawl our way around the Cape and over to India, following the route of the old Portuguese barges. I’d had the Philippines vaguely in mind as our ultimate destination when I’d first started out, but we had no better luck than we had in the Caribbean and what money we had was running out. At last, we put in at Labuan in Brunei, and couldn’t get out again. With only enough money left to buy a few drinks and some rice balls, and just shy of the Philippines, we were forced to go to ground in what must have been the armpit of the world. Labuan, the capitol of Brunei, was bad enough, but the only place we could afford to flop was the lower waterfront district, a nightmare jumble of shanty bars, buildings made of driftwood and tarpaper, and rotting wharves with a sea mist that never seemed to lift and that draped the whole area in a pall of moist, gray gloom.

Since then, I’d been supporting myself with a combination of begging and petty theft with my nights spent either in the clink or the gutter. But with Carol gone, I just couldn’t work up the energy to do anything about my condition. Carol! She wasn’t the sort of girl to be stopped by a run of bad luck. I’d also say she wasn’t the type to take things lying down, but that wouldn’t be exactly true. Soon after we arrived in Labuan, I was hauled off to jail by the local constabulary for not paying a harbor tax. I stayed there for two weeks, and when I got out, I found that Carol hadn’t been idle. She’d been shacking up at the boat with a local bruiser the size of a small house and told me in no uncertain terms that if I wanted to stay around, I could have the engine hold. Well, the idea of living in a cramped, dirty, airless, rat-infested hold on my own boat while Carol lay in the arms of any sailor with a wad of money in our cabin two decks over my head was just too much to take. Ever since then, I’d been on the streets living on garbage and straight whiskey, taking a few bucks from Carol now and then when desperation drove me back to the boat. Just then, I wasn’t quite drunk enough to forget my troubles on account of not having enough money to buy the requisite liquor. Maybe that was lucky, because I was able to notice when someone began shaking my shoulder. I looked up and when my eyes focused again, they showed me that Carol was standing over me.

“Vic, c’mon, I know you’re still sober; you haven’t the money for a good soaking.” She was right, so I forced myself out of the stupor I’d wished myself into and asked her what she wanted. “I have something to show you, Vic; I think we’re back in business.” It took a few seconds for her words to sink in and in the end, I think it was the obvious sincerity in her voice that convinced me she wasn’t kidding. She must’ve seen the same thing in my eyes, because she didn’t wait for an answer. Grabbing me by the arm, she hauled me from the bar and didn’t stop until we got to the boat. From there, she shoved me up the gangplank and into the cabin. I half expected one of her friends to be present and stiffened against it, but no one was there. For the first time since we had arrived in Labuan, Carol and I shared the cabin alone.

“Sit down, Vic,” she said as she opened the secret trap beneath the bunk. I backed myself wearily into a bench at the fold-down table beneath the starboard porthole. While she was reaching beneath the bunk, I couldn’t help noticing the dinginess of the cabin, the smell of stale food and sweat and the yellowed disarray of the bed sheets on the bunk. At last she straightened and came over to the table. Remaining on her feet, she placed a typed manuscript in front of me and from what I could see of its worn and rumpled title page, it seemed to be a diary by someone named Johansen.

“So?” I said.

“I found this in the belongings of Joe Mahmoud; you remember Joe, don’t you?”

I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to admit it, so I took an almost sure bet. “One of your roommates, wasn’t

She didn’t bat an eye. “Right. Anyway, Joe got himself arrested a few weeks ago. He didn’t survive the experience and I was called to the police station yesterday to identify his body. It was in the yard out back. It was him all right. But since he was dead, I figured I had the right to his things. This was in them.” She rested a finger on the dirty manuscript, but I wasn’t terribly interested.

“What about money?” I asked, more to the point.

She took her hand back and rested her fists on her hips. “There was some, and since I’m the only one who’s been able to earn some bread in this partnership, I’m deciding what to do with it, got it?” I admit it, I was just too darn tired after the years at sea and months at Labuan to argue. In effect, I capitulated control of our relationship into Carol’s hands. She became the boss then, and knew it. I must have nodded, because she continued. “Joe had some money and together with the rest I’ve been able to save, we’re going to reoutfit the boat and make one more scavenger hunt.”

“Look, Carol, I’m tired. We’re never going to find anything. Why don’t we just haul up and try to make it back home?”

The stinging pain of a sharp slap across my face caught my attention but good, and, if that wasn’t enough, Carol’s hand got hold of a fistful of my hair and jerked my head back until her angry eyes were able to stare directly into my own. “Now listen up, and listen good,” she said with repressed rage. “I don’t have any intention of going back to the States empty-handed! We came out here to strike it rich, and we’ll do it yet, even over your dead body, got it?” For the first time in our long relationship, I saw Carol’s true nature: brave, resourceful, intelligent, ruthless, and utterly lacking in genuine sentiment. I’d been blinded by my own feelings when our relationship was merely one of convenience for her. But as her anger subsided and she let go her hold on my hair, she allowed the veneer of tenderness to return to her face and voice until, eerily, she was the woman I thought I’d been in love with all this time. The woman, heaven help me, I still loved.

She stroked my cheek in a way that both aroused my old passion and chilled my blood, saying, “I can see you do understand, Vic darling. You see, I remember Joe saying that this manuscript was stolen from a man named Thurston over fifty years ago by a group Joe said his father had belonged to. It was a kind of cult and when his father left it years later, he took this manuscript with him. Joe seemed to think it might be worth something and after he kicked the bucket, I looked it over and Vic, I think it just might be our ticket home.” I looked down at the manuscript with new interest and Carol noticed. “It seems that Johansen discovered an island that had recently risen up from the ocean floor somewhere in these waters and, from what I used to hear Joe saying in his sleep, there was treasure on that island that Johansen never took off.” I started to thumb the pages. “There are coordinates listed in the manuscript that show exactly where we can find it, too.”

She leaned onto the table. “I want to start getting this boat into shape again and take it out to that island, Vic, and I want to start tomorrow. I’ll go ashore and do some shopping. Tonight, you can read the manuscript, after we’ve taken care of some old business.” I looked up at her last words just as her lips met mine; pleasure like lightning coursed along my body. They lifted me from my seat as she steered me toward the bunk. My mind told me the fire of her passion cast no heat, but instinct and longing and the desire to please her were stronger, and, in the end, I never noticed the filth of the bedding.

The next few weeks were a blur of hard work as we prepared the boat for its long journey. As I busied myself with scrubbing, painting, and mechanical repair, Carol bought equipment, food, checked the diving gear, and generally kept an eagle eye on me. Finally, when the work was nearly finished, she came to me and said, “Why don’t we take the afternoon off, and go for a walk?”

I knew by then about her single-mindedness and doubted a simple walk was all she intended, so I asked, “Where to?”

“Over to the Lanes to see someone.” My eyes must’ve narrowed at that. I knew the Lanes to be the merchant district of the lower wharves area, mostly occupied by shady characters who dealt with illegal merchandise and smuggled goods. Not a healthy part of town, but one Carol seemed at home with.

An hour later, we were making our way down a crowded alley in the Lanes when Carol suddenly said, “Here it is.” She slipped into a dark doorway I would’ve missed completely and we found ourselves in a crowded, dingy room obviously meant to be a store.

I looked around, wrinkling my nose at the smell of moldering paper, a smell I’d not encountered in years. I knew before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom that we were in a bookstore. “Why’d you bring us here?”

“Because Kwan might have something that could make our voyage a little easier. You ought to know the worth of research, college boy.” The words hurt and humiliated me, and Carol knew it. “Johansen’s diary,” she continued, “mentioned good directions to that island, but there’s no harm in double checking against some old charts.”