Richard Laymon - Island

“I’ll be alone, anyway, when I walk to the jungle.”

“Connie can’t be watching,” Kimberly explained, “or Wesley won’t make a try for you. He’ll be afraid she might see what’s going on and raise the alarm.”

“He’ll be thinking the rest of us are asleep in our usual places,” Billie said. “If Connie yells and wakes us up, we might come running to help you. He doesn’t want that.”

“He has to think he’s got you alone,” Kimberly added.

Connie started up again. “If you think I’m gonna go running off by myself…”

“Wesley’ll probably be in the jungle,” Kimberly said.

“Like last night when he took off with the dinghy?”

“I know how we can do it,” I said, meeting Connie’s frown. “We’re having our big fight by the fire, okay? Now, suppose I really land one, and knock you out?”

“Oh, terrific,” she said.

“It’s pretend,” I told her. “I wouldn’t actually hit you, but you’d go down and stay down. Like you’re unconscious. That way, you’ll be safe and sound by the fire, in plenty of light and not very far from help. But you’ll be out of the picture, as far as Wesley knows.”

“Sounds good to me,” Billie said.

“Yeah,” said Kimberly. “I don’t see any problem with that.”

Connie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know,” she muttered.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“It seems… kind of corny.”

“Corny?” I asked. “This guy killed your father.”

Wrong thing to say.

“You think I don’t know that? Fuck you!” She flung a handful of sand at me.

At least it wasn’t a spear, this time.

I turned my head away, shutting my eyes and mouth. The grains of sand stung my cheek. They got in my ear, too.

“That’s enough, Connie,” Billie told her.

“He’s such a creep!”

“Just calm down, honey. The thing is, we’ve got to do whatever we can—whether it’s corny or not. It isn’t just that he killed your dad and Keith; he’ll kill us all if we don’t stop him.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

I said, “Maybe everything’ll turn out wonderful, and he’ll stop after he nails my butt.”

Connie glared at me. “Yeah, maybe so.”

A smile actually lifted the comers of Kimberly’s mouth. “You guys oughta be able to pull off a very convincing fight.”

“Only why don’t you save it for tonight?” Billie suggested.

Connie was sort of snarling. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. Then she turned her head and looked over at Thelma. “What about her?”

We had a brief discussion about that. The upshot was, we decided to keep the plot to ourselves. For one thing, Thelma wasn’t in good enough physical shape to be much help in eliminating Wesley. For another, she’s his wife. She apparently loves him, even if he did chop her father’s head in half.

After deciding to leave her in the dark, we figured out where to construct our ambush site.

The “latrine” would go about two-thirds of the distance from our campfire to the edge of the jungle, then off quite a way to the south of the stream that cuts down through the middle of the beach. (The route to be taken by Kimberly and Billie shouldn’t cross the fire. Diversion or no diversion, we don’t want them backlit as they sneak to their position.) For the next couple of hours, we dug in the sand with our hands, with our spears, and with cups and pots. Thelma wondered what we were doing. We explained that we were making a latrine so that we wouldn’t have to risk our lives by going into the jungle. She seemed to think that was a good idea, and she even helped.

While digging, we came up with the idea of adding an enclosure. So we made a couple of frameworks out of branches, then went to the edge of the jungle and gathered foliage. When we were done, we had a double-sided stall with two walls about four feet high. They ran parallel to the edge of the jungle, so Wesley wouldn’t be able to see in—not if he was watching from the general area where we expected him to be.

The make-believe latrine should provide a great hiding place for Kimberly and Billie, if they could just get to it without being spotted.

A problem came up, though, a while after we finished. Thelma wanted to use it.

I had already started to write, but I was sitting within earshot. Kimberly intercepted her. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Well, what do you think?” Thelma said.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t use it.”

“I helped build it.” She was indignant. “What’re you talking about?”

“Nobody can use it till tomorrow.”

“Why on earth not?”

“It has to set,” Kimberly explained.

Thelma frowned and looked confused. “What?”

“The sand needs time to set. Otherwise, it’ll all fall in and fill up the hole.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No, it’s true.”

She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s true,” I chimed in. “You never use a sand latrine the first day. I thought everyone knew that.”

Thelma wrinkled her face. She looked quite perplexed, and vaguely suspicious.

“Where am I supposed to go, then?” she asked her sister.

“The same place as always.” She nodded toward the jungle. “I’ll get Billie and Connie. We’ll all go together, from now on.”

“What about me?” I asked.

Thelma narrowed her eyes at me. Kimberly, though, is always a sport. She knew I was mostly kidding. “I think you’ll be fine right here. We won’t go far.”

“Don’t you think you might need a guy along for protection?” I asked.

“We’ll be fine, Rupert.”

“Have it your way.”

So all the gals went trooping off into the bush without me. I stayed where I was, but quit working on the journal for a while. I didn’t want any distractions, in case Wesley might pop up out of nowhere and make a try for me.

Even though I felt vulnerable, I was fairly safe. I was surrounded by stretches of sand, for one thing. For another, I was fairly well armed—a spear, a club and a selection of rocks within easy reach.

Also, the gals never went very far. They only pushed into the jungle far enough so I wouldn’t be able to see them. I could hear their voices, though, so I knew they’d be able to hear me if I had to yell for help.

Nothing happened.

It’s been pretty uneventful, since then. I’ve just kept working on the journal here, taking my time, keeping an eye on the gals. Kimberly and Billie went in swimming for a while. Connie went for a climb on the rocks, but never wandered out of sight. Thelma has mostly just sat around and napped.

I’ll probably try to take a nap, myself.

It may turn out to be a long night.

Thelma turned in, last night, shortly after dark. That seemed to be a good thing, since we needed her out of the picture. She’d worried me, the way she had spent so much of the day sleeping. I was afraid she might be wide awake, ready to stay up all night, and manage to wreck the ambush we had planned.

I said as much to the others, after she’d gone off.

“It’s not uncommon at all,” Billie said, “for people to sleep a lot more than usual when they’re going through tough times emotionally. It’s a way of escaping from the pain of the situation.”

Billie had been a high-school teacher before marrying Andrew. She’d taught English, but you have to learn a lot of psychology to become a teacher—at least in California. That’s probably how she picked up the stuff about escaping with sleep. Or maybe she picked it up watching Oprah.

Kimberly said, “Sleeping’s about the last thing I feel like doing.”