Richard Laymon - Island

While I put on the shredded remains of my shorts, I checked on Thelma. She was pretty far off, but still spread out on her back, the same as before.

It didn’t seem right.

If I’d drowned her, she should’ve sunk. If I hadn’t drowned her, she ought to be either swimming somewhere or floundering in the water, gasping and coughing.

Just didn’t make any sense for her to be floating like that, as if asleep.

I lowered the outboard back into the water and got it started. Keeping it throttled down, I turned the dinghy toward Thelma. I puttered toward her very slowly.

The prow was aimed between her legs.

I steered to the side a little earlier than I needed to, just to avoid temptation.

I tried to miss her completely.

But the port side of the dinghy gave her left foot a gentle nudge. She didn’t so much as flinch. She simply remained sprawled on her back, and began to swivel counterclockwise.

She reminded me of the knife thrower’s assistant in a circus act. The beautiful gal in a skimpy outfit who gets strapped to a wheel, gets twirled, gets the fun of being the knife target.

Except Thelma wasn’t beautiful and she didn’t have a skimpy outfit on. She was naked. Her huge breasts, shiny and pale in the moonlight, sort of drooped off the sides of her chest like a couple of seasick voyagers getting ready to woops.

The bump by the dinghy made her spin half a turn.

She appeared to resume spinning when I started to circle around her with the boat.

The waves of my wake made her tilt and bob.

She seemed oblivious of it all.

Reaching down between my knees, I grabbed one of the machetes. I picked it up and waved it overhead. “Hey!” I shouted. “Thelma! Look what I’ve got?”

She just lay there in the middle of my wave-circles.

I threw the machete at her.

It was supposed to be more of a toss, really. A gentle, underhand toss—the way you might throw a ball to a little kid.

Intended to startle her, make her flinch or try to dodge out of the way.

It wasn’t even meant, actually, to hit her.

For some reason, the toss went haywire. For some reason, I swung my arm up with more force than I’d planned on. Instead of making a shallow arc through the air so it would fall fairly harmlessly on or near Thelma, the machete went high.

Maybe all “Freudian slips’ aren’t verbal.

Maybe this was a slip-of-the-arm.

Who knows? Maybe there was no subconscious intent, and it just happened because my coordination was loused up from all the running and swimming and stuff.

Anyway, I was surprised and shocked to see that I hadn’t given the machete such a gentle toss, after all.

It flew almost straight up, tumbling end over end.

I said, “Oh, shit.”

As it flipped higher and higher, I had no idea where it might come down. For all I knew, it might land on me.

We’re talking a very large knife, built for whacking its way through sugar cane or jungle or something. The blade didn’t have much of a point, but it must’ve been two feet long—broad and heavy.

It tumbled blade over handle on the way up.

To a height of at least thirty feet.

At the very top, it made a tight U-turn. Then it started down, still tumbling.

Right away, I saw that I was no longer in danger of being Ground Zero.

Thelma was.

Thelma!” I shouted. “Watch out!”

She didn’t react—just floated spread-eagled on her back like a naked and unlovely knife thrower’s assistant.

She’s dead, I told myself. Don’t worry about it.

But I yelled “Thelma!” again, anyway.

And watched the machete tall, whipping end over end.

Maybe it would miss her, after all. Or maybe she would be struck by its handle, not its blade.

It struck blade first. It caught her just below the navel. It sank in almost to the handle.

Thelma screamed.

She was punched underwater by the blow. Her scream went gurgly, then silent.

She vanished, swallowed by the black.

My own scream ended when I ran out of breath. Gasping and whimpering, I gave the motor full throttle and sped away at top speed—which seemed way too slow.

I glanced back.

No sign of Thelma.

After that, I didn’t look back any more. I was scared of what I might see.

I sort of thought she might be swimming after me.

I took the other machete with me, climbed onto the dock, and tied up the dinghy. Still feeling creeped out, I wouldn’t look behind me at the cove as I hurried to the foot of the dock. Nor when I walked through the thick grass at the rear of the mansion.

The whole thing had been too damn weird.

Also, I’d never killed anyone before.

I felt pretty strange about killing Thelma.

It was bad enough that I’d ended the life of a human being. But she was a woman, too. You’re not supposed to hurt women, much less kill them. Also, she was Kimberly’s sister; I didn’t feel good at all about that.

On the other hand, it wasn’t as if Thelma hadn’t deserved what she got. She’d thrown in with Wesley, who’d murdered her own father and her own sister’s husband. Along with Wesley, she’d done some vicious, sick things to Billie, Connie and Kimberly. To those kids, too—Erin and Alice—not to mention helping Wesley murder their parents.

If that weren’t enough, she’d tried to kill me a few times—including the attempt at the lagoon that had nearly wiped out Connie. I was damn lucky to still be alive.

Also, it wasn’t as if I’d murdered her in cold blood. Our struggle in the cove had been self-defense, on my part. I’d only been trying to stay alive.

And the final deal with the machete had been sort of an accident. Which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been playing dead, or whatever the hell she’d been up to.

She had nobody to blame but herself.

In a way, I felt sort of angry at Thelma for making me kill her.

In another way, though…

Maybe I’d better not write it.

Oh, why the hell not? Who am I trying to impress? The whole idea is to tell what happened—accurately, without any phoney stuff…

It’s not that I didn’t feel sort of rotten in some ways about killing Thelma. Especially because she was Kimberly’s sister, and I hated the idea of causing Kimberly any more grief.

But here’s the deal.

There was part of me that felt absolutely great about killing Thelma.

We’d gone one-on-one, her or me, a fight to the finish, and I’d wasted her ass.

Sure, I felt sort of horrified and disgusted and guilty and spooked and very tired—but holy Jesus I was so excited by it that I felt all trembly inside. As I walked through the grass of the back lawn, I clenched my teeth and pumped my machete at the sky and hissed, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

One down, one to go.

And with any luck, the “one to go” might already be out of the picture. Wesley’d taken a major fall down those stairs. At the very least, he’d been injured so badly that Thelma’d gone after me without him. Maybe he’d broken a leg. Maybe his neck.

In a way, I hoped the fall hadn’t killed him.

Just busted him up enough to make him easy for me.

Even from the back yard, I could see light in a few of the mansion’s windows. Wesley or Thehna had turned on some lights to help them chase me down. From the look of things, nobody’d gotten around, yet, to turning them off.

A good sign.

It might mean that Wesley was at least disabled.

I planned to enter by the front door, so I walked through the yard alongside the house, past the window where I’d watched Wesley and Thehna brutalize Erin, and on past the corner of the veranda. The front area was still brightly illuminated by the spotlights.