Terminal Island (25 page)

The music stops. For a few seconds, men and beast lie still, panting together, then the topmost man reaches to his belt and produces a knife. A small spotlight comes on, opening a peephole of true color: the silver sheen of the blade against the bison’s brown wool; the polished agate of its eyeball rolling in fear.

Holy shit
, Henry mouths.

The knife goes in. The audience emits a collective cry of horror, a vast
No!
It is quick; the man saws across the bison’s throat with practiced strokes, giving neither the animal nor the spectators time to think. The creature heaves at the pain, but the men have it well pinned now, hanging tight as it beats out its death throes beneath them.

Garish jets of blood pulse from the wound into the audience, and the nearest spectators sob with religious ecstasy as the hot liquid splatters their faces. There is a rush to the front rows, everyone jamming in for the privilege.

Henry’s mind reels with anger and disgust—he can’t take much more of this.

Now the animal is only quivering, not fighting, and the hooded butcher makes free with his knife, working around its neck and chipping at the bone until the shaggy head comes off. He stands up, holding the dripping trophy aloft with both hands. There are shrieks of horror, shouts of
“Boooo!”

The man capers around with the head, resting it on his shoulder and trying to delight the audience with his antics like the horned boy did earlier, but the boos and catcalls only increase. People down front start throwing things at the stage. The other scribbled men try to take the head away and the scene becomes a slapstick game of football, the four black figures slipping and sliding in the pool of blood as they fight over the calf’s head.

That blood. Henry can smell it, can practically taste it; the coppery, animal stench fills the auditorium. It makes him sick to his stomach; he feels dizzy. It doesn’t help that he can hear other people throwing up.

There is no end to it.

The longer this grotesque shtick goes on, the more there is a mood in the audience of overkill—this has gone on long enough. But no relief seems to be forthcoming; even the players are getting exhausted, falling and finding it hard to get up.

Then,
CRACK!—
an explosion of pure light and sound.

Multiple suns of burning phosphorus blast the auditorium, slamming the crowd back in their seats, frying their nerves. It is such a violent contrast to the previous darkness that it sears Henry to the backs of his eyeballs. The whole audience emits a whoop of pained surprise.

Shielding his eyes, Henry can see a blinding figure suspended over the stage, enormous silvered wings outstretched. The light is actually amplified by the wings—they are reflecting it at the audience, the harsh glare multiplied by the mirror-scaled face of each wing. The flares burn out in a matter of seconds, leaving red afterimages, but the stage lights remain trained on that fabulous vision.

It is an angel. A spectacular angel in a flowing white gown.

Around him, Henry can hear sobbing, grateful cries of “Athena!”

The evil stagehands have tumbled away as if hit with a bomb. The angel glides forward and settles gently beside the headless carcass of the bison calf. Kneeling down, she reaches out her glittering white arm and lays her hand on the calf’s side. Suddenly it heaves as if given life. Blood gushes from its severed arteries; air spurts from its windpipe.

“
God
,” Henry says in disgust.

Athena stands up and removes her gold cape, draping it over the undead carcass. There is a long drum roll. Milking the suspense, she finally yanks away the cloth in a pop of flash powder. After her dynamic entrance it’s a pretty routine magic trick, but flawlessly done: The calf’s body has disappeared. In its place is a small white figurine—an abstract human form with smooth bumps for horns.

Henry recognizes the thing. It is the same statuette he saw first as a child, and then a second time only hours ago in Carol Arbuthnot’s possession. Feeling a bit duped, he wonders how many of them exist. Are they all just a cheap knock-offs, like the tourist junk sold in the island’s gift shops?

The angel makes a gesture of kissing or blowing into the sculpture, and clasps it to her breast. Holding it there, she rises slowly upward and out of sight. The light goes with her, abandoning the grisly, ruined stage to utter darkness.

The curtain draws shut.

Henry imagines that this is the end of the show, and is frustrated to the point of desperation when no one moves.

“Is that it?” he demands drunkenly.

“Shh!”

The four bloodied stagehands reappear. Now they are wearing white aprons and carrying a vase with a large white flower, a covered silver platter, and a table and chair. Acting like fussy waiters, they quickly set the table at the edge of the stage and stand back as the mare-woman appears. She is haughty as a queen, regally allowing them to seat her and then holding them back with an upraised finger as if to savor the last moment of anticipation…then lowering the finger.

With a grandiose flourish they remove the lid of the platter. To Henry it is a bit of an anticlimax—sitting on the plate is the bison’s head.

The horse-woman stabs into the head with her knife and fork…and the head
screams
. Strange, discordant music accompanies the screaming, accelerating in tempo and volume as the head not only cries out, but writhes and bleeds—blood wells up from the platter, spilling over the edge of the table into the woman’s satin-gowned lap. She is unfazed by the mess or the dreadful screaming, serenely cutting off a piece of meat and eating it.

The screaming stops. She dabs her masked mouth, then contemptuously tosses the bloody napkin on the table. A low drumbeat can be heard. The waiters stiffen, standing bolt upright and looking out over the heads of the audience. The mare-woman rises to her feet.

It is the bull-man. He bursts through the double doors of the theater, gold horns aflame, holding up the glowing white figurine in one hand and pointing accusingly at the woman with the other. Trumpets blare as he strides down the center aisle, trailing smoke and sparks.

The stagehands seem to visibly shrink, trying to skulk away, but there is a deafening crackle of electricity and all four abruptly jerk up short like marionettes, jets of blue flame shooting from the tops of their heads. With a horrible screeching sound they wilt, smoking, to the floor.

Standing in her bloodstained gown, the mare-woman doesn’t flinch, but awaits the onslaught with grim fury of her own, looking imperiously down as the bull-man approaches. He stops before her, chest heaving with rage…and then seems to weaken. His horns sputter out, and the pale light within the figurine goes dark. As if burdened with invisible chains, his arms slowly fall to his sides; his shoulders slump and his great head tilts back as if in weary supplication to some nonexistent deity. It is as if he cannot remember what he came here to do.

The mare-woman looks at him coldly, unrelenting, in a posture of icy dignity. Fully composed, she tosses her head scornfully and turns away, leaving him standing there at the foot of the stage. His stature seems to have remarkably shrunk.

The lights go down.

Chapter Twenty-Five

ACT FIVE:

RESURRECTION

T
he curtain opens upon black-light again, but the forest has been dismantled, the scene of slaughter cleaned up. Only the bison’s fluorescent white skull remains, littering a barren hill that is the antithesis of the earlier day-lit grassy mound. A single stark tree marks the spot of the murder. Rising out of the background is a diseased-looking moon, oppressively huge.

A slim, nude figure sits in the branches of the tree, silhouetted against the moon’s poisonous green glow. Her back is to the audience, but Henry can tell it is the same girl who was raped; the one who gave birth to the horned child. The wind moans as if across barren plains.

“Iacchus!” a deep voice shouts from offstage. “Iacchus! Where is your sister? I know you are hiding her from me! Where is she?”

The bull-man appears, picking his way along the path as if following vague directions. He is still diminished; not nearly the terrifying specter he first appeared. In his hand is the ceramic figure. “There you are,” he says. As he approaches the girl, she weightlessly drops down and turns to face him. There is a loud rattlesnake hiss.

She has no face; only a black pit.

The minotaur climbs halfway up to her, careful not to intrude too close, holding up the white enamel figurine as some kind of peace offering. Her void of a face stares blankly down at him for long minutes. Impatiently, he ventures nearer, trying to elicit some response. As if coaxing a zombie, he gently takes her limp hand and places the figure into it, folding her pliable fingers around the slender base. She does not flinch or drop it.

Encouraged, he takes her frail body and lightly sits her down on the black grass, kneeling beside her and nudging her legs apart. Then, with agonizing care, he guides her arm so that the statue’s head is pressed into her crotch. As it goes in, the bull-man trembles with the strain—there is a flicker of lightning, a delayed beat of thunder. He pushes it in deeper, her head lolling against his shoulder as if unconscious. A low, humming sound becomes audible, the swelling vibration of an approaching train.

The statuette slips in all the way to its base, and the bull-man tenderly lays the girl on her back. Then, like an exhausted athlete, he falls back on his haunches and takes a great gulp of air, as if he had been holding his breath. With his muzzle turned upward to the heavens, he doesn’t see the girl move. She is too fast.

With a single unhurried motion, she removes the bloodied figurine from within herself as if removing a dagger from its sheath, raises it high over the awful void of her face, and with both hands plunges it with savage force into the bull-man’s right thigh.

BWAAA!

With a harsh epiphany of trumpets, the minotaur falls backward, clutching his leg in agony. There is no sign of the statuette; it is completely embedded, more deeply than it was in her. Stage-smoke billows up, and ichor black as crude oil erupts from between the bull-man’s groping hands, splattering and fouling the luminous snowy-white of his head and body. For a moment it’s hard to see anything. With a volley of lightning and thunder, gusts of rain begin to lash down.

As her father continues to writhe, the hollow-faced girl serenely threads an enormous needle and then crawls like a spider over his body. Straddling his leg, she jams the needle into the black lip of the wound, causing him to spasm backward, his hands fluttering in agonizing pain. Then she begins to sew, closing the figurine up inside him. Her posture is brightly industrious; if she had a mouth, she would be whistling. As she continues, he seems to fall into a stupor.

The rain and noise gradually die out. Faint light begins to come up, the dishwater hues of pre-dawn, canceling out some of the black-light and revealing hints of true color, the welcome drabness of reality. The moon fades from view.

Finishing up, the girl rises from her stitching as from a job well done. Looking appraisingly at the sky, she gets down on her hands and knees and seems to sniff the ground, probing for something. All of a sudden she burrows headfirst into the black earth. Sinuous as a lizard, she squirms underground in a series of thrusting, wriggling pulsations, driving up a mound of soil behind her heels. In a matter of seconds she is gone.

The bull-man—her father—lies still.

For a long time nothing seems to happen except that overcast light slowly comes up. It is a bleak scene: the muddy hill, the lone tree, and the polluted body of the minotaur. Then, so gradual as to be almost unnoticeable, there is a change in his wounded leg. The bloody thigh with its zigzag black stitches is growing, swelling. There is that rumbling freight-train sound again. As the leg bloats, Henry can hear excited whispering around him in the audience: “
Shh! Look! Look!
”

The leg straightens and pops rigid from the pressure, and suddenly the bull-man awakens, roaring with terrific pain. Steam shoots from beneath his body, and hairy roots come snaking out of the ground to pin him down.

BWAAA!
—now it appears that there is something moving within the drum-taut skin of his thigh, a round, tumorous bulge growing outward as through a membrane. As the flesh stretches and becomes translucent, the shape of a face can be seen pushing through—a childlike head with glowing red nubs for horns. In awe, people begin to chant, “ZAH-GRAY-OOS! ZAH-GRAY-OOS! ZAH-GRAY-OOS!”

A sinkhole opens beneath the bull-man and he falls out of sight. A second later the hole erupts in a pillar of fire at least ten feet high, its radiant white heat reaching to the back of the theater.

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
—the theater goes pitch-dark as the last chord is struck, ringing to infinity like the last bar of
Also Sprach Zarathustra
.

Suddenly in the dark there’s an arm around Henry’s neck, choking him.

He’s too weak and doped up to put up much of a fight. Powerful hands pin his arms and a cloth gag is jammed in his mouth. As someone binds his wrists and ankles with twine, a burlap bag is roughly thrust over his head. He is carried up the aisle.

What now?
he thinks, weeping helplessly. He tries to scream against the gag,
“You fuckers!” —
but it is muffled to nothing.

He feels himself being carried out of the dark theater and downstairs to the lobby, then around a corner into a smaller room, then down a second, more cramped flight of stairs and finally into a dank, uncarpeted space where the sound of shuffling feet echoes off the walls. There is a bass thrum of machinery. Through the burlap hood he can see twinkles of flame.

They sit him on the cold concrete floor and hog-tie his wrists to his ankles. His hood is removed.

Henry looks blearily around. He is in a large basement of some kind—a cavernous room with stone walls and a low ceiling of plumbing and heating conduits, everything furred black with greasy filth, the pipes densely interwoven as the roots of an enormous tree. The tangled machinery glimmers redly overhead, lit by torches mounted to either side of a massive steel door. An industrial dungeon.