The Island of Excess Love (6 page)

Even in my confusion I know that's not the thing to say to Hex, who is not what he once was. He lunges at Merk and Merk fires the gun and I scream, the fear tearing through my spell-induced muteness. Hex dives to the deck and Merk grabs him and wrestles him and I throw myself onto Merk.

Then there is a loud sharp sound and pain and then everything is dark.

*   *   *

When I open my eyes I am lying in darkness, tied up. The rope is abrading my wrists and blood is pounding in my skull. The boat is moving beneath me, the air is dank, and my stomach wobbles like a jellyfish. Once when walking on the beach, one stung me on my foot and the pain had the same gelatinous, veined quality as the creature that administered it.

“Hex!” I manage to say, after a long time, the muteness trying to strangle me again.

Someone is speaking to me but I can't see who it is. “Pen, listen to me very carefully. We're back on the ship. You're under some kind of spell. Your father Merk is under it too. He tied us all up. I don't know where Hex is, or Ash or Ez. Or Argos. I think Merk tied them up too. But I think everything is going to be okay. We just have to be patient.”

“Who are you?” I ask. “Are you a ghost?”

“I'm your brother, Venice.”

“I don't know who you are,” I whisper. I think the ghost might want to harm me.

“I'll tell you,” he says. “Don't be afraid.”

When he finishes telling me the story about the family ripped apart by an earthquake, the ghost pauses as if trying to catch his breath. Or hold back a sob.

Is he a ghost? Ghosts don't breathe. Ghosts don't cry.

But whoever he is, my heart leaps toward the picture he's painted in my brain—a three-story house the color of pink roses, full of food and music and love. I want to go there, that's all I want.

“Just don't be afraid, okay?” he tells me. “You are very brave.”

I don't know what to say. I am afraid. I'm afraid of everything. When he says the word
brave
, he must not be talking about me.

“The spell only seems to work on the ship. When we reach land you'll be yourself again.”

Reach land? What land? Even in this confused state I know I have to get back to the house he told me about. “I want to go home.”

“I know,” he says. “But I think there must be some reason why we have to go wherever this ship is taking us. Maybe someone needs help.”

I don't know how to help anyone, not even myself. “Why aren't you…” I try to ask but my tongue feels thick.

“Why aren't I under the spell? I don't know. It didn't affect me.”

My stomach interrupts us with a loud growl. “Are you hungry?” the ghost asks.

I tell him that I am, and thirsty, too. My mouth feels like sand and salt.

“Merk will bring us food and water,” the ghost, my brother, promises. But I don't know what I believe anymore.

And then I see the man who took my eye.

He's standing above me wearing a black top hat and a long black coat that resembles charred skin. On his hands are thick black rubber gloves and on his feet are heavy boots with sharp spikes. His eyes are hidden behind dark oversize goggles. He takes out something from the pocket of his coat and fondles it in his gloved hand. Then he removes the goggles and smiles at me, his face stretching into a long, strange shape like a child's Halloween mask. One eye is an empty hollow. Like mine. The man takes the thing from his pocket, holding it tenderly between his thumb and forefinger, and pushes it into the eye socket. It's brown and smaller than his other eye and I know where he got it. It's mine.

“Are you okay?” the ghost says. I'd forgotten he was there.

I can't speak so I just point at the man.

“Do you see someone who scares you? A dark-haired man with a small beard?”

“Yes,” I manage.

“He's dead,” the ghost promises me. “I'll tell you a story, okay?”

“My eye,” I say.

“That's Kronen. The Giant maker.”

The ghost pauses as if to gauge my reaction and then goes on in a soft voice. I try to listen to him but I'm still staring at Kronen who is doing a slow jig in his heavy boots, his face twisted into that grimacing smile.

“You killed him. You're having a different kind of vision now, but it's not real. It's because we're on the ship. It makes you see things that frighten you. Tell Kronen to leave you alone. You've already killed him.”

Kronen leans close to me so I can see my eye stuck in his misshapen head.

“Tell him,” my ghost brother says.

I can't.

“Tell him.”

“Venice?”

“Yes, I'm Venice. You can tell him.”

I see a tall gold building made of the skeletons of the dead.
BANK OF THE APOCALYPSE
, reads a sign. A man and a Giant stand before me. Kronen and Kutter. I'm holding a sword in my hand. Hex's sword. He is gone but I'll find him again. I will find him, and my other friends.

And the words come to me then. “I know of many things,” I say. “Gods and monsters, transformations, spells and enchantments, trees and oceans, hospitality, loyalty, betrayal, great wars. I know of
kleos
—glory—and I know of love.”

“You are Pen the storyteller,” says my brother, Venice, the ghost. “Your words are powerful. Your love is powerful.”

And with that Kronen fades away into the bowels of the ship.

 

6

 

MAELSTROM

 

I'
M SAFE FROM THE MONSTER
maker Kronen but I'm not safe from the monsters of thirst and hunger. My lips are ringed with sore, dry skin that gets more irritated when I probe it with my swollen tongue. The roof of my mouth is swollen, too, and it even hurts to blink my eyes. My stomach seethes.

Venice keeps talking to me in his soothing ghost voice but he sounds farther and farther away.

At last we hear footsteps and someone is here with us.

The man holds my head up and pours fresh water into my mouth, relieving the dirty thirst. I try not to let a single drop escape even though he's pouring too fast and I have to keep swallowing hard. Then he feeds me some type of porridge with a spoon. I gulp it down as fast as he'll give it to me.

“Good job, girl, we'll be at our destination soon,” the man growls.

When he leaves, ghost boy tells me the man's name is Merk and that he's my father. But he can't be. I remember my father. He was a tall, quiet man with gentle hands, not this frightening pirate who has tied us up in the hull of a haunted ship.

“Why?” I ask, yearning for my real father, my real life, not this.

“Why what?”

“Why everything? Why are we here? Where is here? What happened to everyone?” I don't want to cry but I can feel a tingling in my tear ducts.

“Please try to rest now,” he says. So I close my eyes, hoping it will all be different when I wake up. Hoping I will be home, wherever that is, locked in safely, away from the world.

*   *   *

Instead I wake to a violent swaying. The ship is being tossed as if spewed between the maws of two blue sea monsters and we can hear the wind thrashing above us.

“It's just a storm,” Venice says.

Just a storm? This isn't any regular storm. A word from a book comes to my mind, a word from a book someone I love read to me.
Maelstrom.

My stomach lurches and I pray that I won't vomit the food that man gave me earlier.

“Just try to breathe,” Venice tells me. “Like Hex and Ez taught us. Remember?”

It's almost worse to think about breathing. What if I've forgotten how to breathe at all? What if some part of my brain has been permanently damaged so it will always feel like I have to consciously control every blink and breath?

While I'm gulping air we hear a door bang open and shouting and stomping and bumping and then three other figures, also trussed up with rope, are here in the dark with us.

I can't see their faces. One of them is sobbing, one of them is singing paeans like an angel, and the third is screaming obscenities while Venice tries to quiet them down.

“What the fuck?” the swearing one says.

“Hex, try to stay calm. There's a storm but I think it will be okay. We have to keep it together.”

Hex? Hex is here?

“Fuck that! And who's crying? Shut the fuck up with the crying, will you?”

That doesn't sound like Hex.

The crying one makes shuddering, gulping sounds as he tries to stifle his sobs.

“Ez, it's okay,” Venice says. “We'll be okay.”

“Eliot?” says the crying one.

“No, it's Venice, Pen's brother.”

“Where's my brother?”

“Ez, listen carefully, Eliot isn't here. You are all under some kind of a spell. But I think when we can get off the ship it will stop.”

The singing one starts up again. Maybe he is an angel. The sound is celestial—if it were a color it would be pale blue—but the ship is rocking so hard I can't really appreciate it. It's like hearing angels sing when you're tied up in hell. I go back to concentrating on not throwing up.

“Shut the fuck up, everyone! Stop singing!” The swearer.

“Ash, can you be quiet for a little while?” Venice says gently, which seems to be the only tone he ever uses. Maybe that's a ghost thing. “It's really nice but everyone's having a hard time right now.”

The ship heaves and one of the bodies rolls closer to me and I can see his black hair, the white ovoid of his face. My heart strains against the rope around my chest.

“What's wrong with you?” he practically spits. “Your eyes look crazy. Are you high? I told you not to get high anymore. You are such a mess.”

“Hex,” says Venice. “That's Pen, your girlfriend. Do you remember her?”

“Bitch,” Hex mutters.

My stomach is working its way up to my mouth and I'm bathed in the cold sweat of nausea. The ghost boy wriggles closer so our shoulders are touching. “He doesn't know who you are,” he says. “Do you know who he is?”

I remember a slim, black-haired person holding me in a bed, reading me stories while the world went to hell around us. But we were safe; we had each other. He would never have called me a bitch. He loved me, didn't he? He …

The ship seizes again and the porridge erupts, splashing out of me in a puddle of stench.

“You're disgusting,” he says, like he's pumping me with venom, and it feels as if I might as well have disgorged my own heart.

I don't understand why we were forced away from our home. For what? For this?

“Talk to him,” my little ghost brother tells me. “Tell him who you are.”

The singing and crying are louder now. I'm too sick to do anything. “I want to go home.”

“I know. But we can't now. Tell him about you.”

“Hex?” I try. “It's me, Pen.”

He doesn't answer.

So I try harder, because that's all you can do, isn't it? I try to breathe and focus and follow the pictures in my mind, letting them lead me. “Do you remember? We, and our friends, fought Giants and witches and in the end we lost each other but finally we were reunited. You came back to me. We love each other,” I say. “I love you.”

I wait, expecting him to curse at me, but he's silent. So are Ash and Ez. Even the ship holds its breath. But by now I should know the sound of silence before an eruption.

Something crashes and bangs, slamming us against the side of the ship, and just as Hex says my name, his voice different this time (perhaps with the dawning of recognition?), I am lost once again in darkness.

 

7

 

CADAVERS

 

W
HEN
I
WAKE
I
'M LYING
on wet black sand. It glints—shattered quartz crystal—in the sunlight that warms my back. Sunlight? Pure and bright the way it was, Then. The color of yellow crocuses. I dig my hands into the sand, rubbing the grains between my fingers. I try to sit up but my body is too sore and weak. My hair is heavy and, when I touch it, it's matted with strands of seaweed and bits of broken shells. There's a crusty patch of dried blood on my left temple, which accounts for the pain in my head.

I try to piece everything together in my mind, like when you wake up from a nightmare that you want to make sense of, a nightmare of sea monsters, of no lesser ilk than Scylla and Charybdis, but this is real. I am Pen. Penelope Overland. The Earth Shaker changed everything but I still live in a pink house by the sea. A Giant chased me and my family and friends onto a bewitched ship. It sailed us out into the waters and Merk, my birth father, also bewitched, tied us up and threw us into the lower compartment. Hex couldn't remember who I was. He seemed to hate me. I tried to explain. There was a storm.…

Oh, god, Hex. Ez. Ash. Venice. Argos. Even Merk's gone. And there is no sign of our ship with the portentous horse on its prow.

I force myself to sit up and look around me. I'm on a beach, in a cove. Clear blue water slides up onto the sand and then retreats. A forest of trees rises in the distance. Yellow, white, and purple wildflowers and tall sea grasses grow down toward the shore. I may be dreaming but I think I can hear bird songs.

Above me fly a flock of white birds. Doves? I can count twelve. There was a dove in the dream I had about my mother. In
The Aeneid
two doves sent by Venus led Aeneas to the golden bough, the enchanted branch he had to give to Proserpina, queen of the underworld, in order to be admitted to her realm to visit the shade of his dead father. So the sighting of these birds is especially significant (though I'm not exactly sure in what way), but any bird sighting would be.

It's like a world before the Earth Shaker hit.