Richard Laymon - Island

Erin still stood at the door of her cage.

I called out to her. It was a whisper, really. She didn’t respond, so I whispered her name more loudly. The pale blot of her head jerked. Her hands fell away from the bars. The width of her body narrowed, then widened, as she turned around.

“Erin,” I whispered again.

She started walking toward me. She had a slight hitch to her gait—a limp.

Which gave me a sudden, harsh reminder of what I’d watched them do to her. Wesley and Thelma. In the downstairs room. How they’d brought Erin in wearing a white blouse, a cute tartan kilt, and knee socks. How they’d stripped her, brutalized her, done such horrible, sick things to her… All while I watched, guilty and aroused. It made me feel strange, just thinking about it. I had to squirm a little in the dewy grass.

“Rupert?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

She stopped at the bars and lay down on her side of them, matching my position, her head turned, her face close to mine.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Okay. What’s going on here?”

“Wesley came.”

“Where is he?”

“Up on top of the cages. I think so, anyhow. It’s kinda hard to keep track of him all the time.”

“Is everybody okay?”

“Rupert?” Alice’s voice, her whisper loud.

I turned my head and found her. She was still at the corner of her cage, but no longer in a hunched position. She was poised there on all fours like a dog, her face to the bars. “Don’t leave me out of everything,” she said.

“You were asleep, anyway,” Erin told her.

“Was not.”

“We’d better keep our voices down,” I said. “Come on,” I told Erin. I picked up my two weapons. Then she and I crawled, side by side, the bars between us.

I wished there was more light. I wanted to be able to see her and Alice. But this was better than last time, when the darkness had been almost total. This time, at least I could make out their shapes—sort of. Basically, they weren’t much more than pale blurs without any distinct features.

At the corner of her cage, Erin halted. I crawled around it, turned myself so I faced the rear, put down my spear and machete, and sat in the grass between the two cages.

Alice on my left, Erin on my right.

Like old times, except this time we were gathered at the back of the passageway, not the front.

“I thought you were asleep,” I told Alice. That’s why I didn’t…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m sure glad you’re back.”

“Is everybody okay?” I asked.

“All depends,” Alice said. “What do you… ?”

“We’re fine,” Erin said. “I mean, you know. Not exactly fine and dandy, but we’re the same as before.”

“He hasn’t been at us,” Alice explained.

“Where’d you go?”

“Over to the house, for starters. I went looking for the keys, so I could come back and let everybody out.”

“Did you find them?” Erin asked.

“Wesley doesn’t have them?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know he hasn’t got them,” Alice said.

“Well, he didn’t unlock any cages.”

“He walked by. You could see what he had and didn’t. And he didn’t have any keys. Not if they weren’t, like, stuck up his kazoo.”

“He couldn’t fit them up his kazoo,” Erin pointed out, sounding a trifle annoyed. “That big brass ring? No way.”

“It was a figure of speech, stupid.”

“Anyway, I guess she’s right. We would’ve seen the keys if he’d had them.”

“What did he have?” I asked.

“A boner,” Alice said.

“Very nice,” Erin said.

“Well, he did.”

“I’m sure Rupert wants to hear all about it.”

I was blushing, but the darkness kept it hidden. “What sort of weapons did he have?” I asked.

Erin said, Two knives. Does the torch count?”

“I guess.”

“Okay, then the torch. And a can of gas.”

“A what?”

“A can of gasoline.”

“We keep tons of it around for the generator,” Alice explained.

“For a lot of things,” Erin added.

“Mostly for the generator, though. We’ve got tons.”

“Wesley has about two gallons,” Erin said. “He took the can up with him.”

“He says he’s gonna incinerate us,” Alice said.

“He won’t do it,” Erin said. “It’s just a threat. If he burns us up, he won’t be able to mess around with us any more. It’d wreck everything for him.”

“Yeah? Well just suppose he only burns some of us?”

Erin didn’t have a quick answer for that.

“He’s already doused Billie,” Alice added.

I felt my stomach sink and shrivel. “Are you sure?”

“It was the first thing he did,” Erin explained. “He showed up, I don’t know, like maybe an hour or so after you took off? With the torch and gas.”

“And no pants on, as per usual,” Alice added, sounding disgusted.

“So he parades by our cages, and says how we’re all going to help him set up a surprise for you.”

“He called you a chickenshit motherfucking asswipe,” Alice explained.

“Real nice,” Erin said. “You don’t have to tell him everything.”

“I’d want to know it, if somebody called me…”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “What about the surprise?”

“He said you paid him a visit at the house, and that you ran away, but Thelma’d gone after you. He said Thelma would probably kill you…”

“Nail your puny little butt,” Alice elaborated.

“But just in case she didn’t get you, he wanted to have a surprise ready. He said you’d probably come over here to the cages, first thing. So we should be expecting you, and we’d better not yell and try to warn you off.”

“He said he’d toast our twats.”

“Alice! Stop it!”

“I’m just telling what he said. “

“Well, don’t. For Godsake. You don’t have to be so crass.”

“You talk just as bad. Only not around Rupert.”

“Hey, girls. Come on.”

“She’s got the hots for you, Rupert.”

“I do not.”

“Like you’d ever admit it to him. But she does, Rupert. Trust me. She told me so.”

“Liar.”

“You’re the liar.”

“I never said I had the hots for him.”

“Maybe not in those exact words, but…”

“Can’t we talk about it some other time?” I suggested. “I mean, if I don’t take care of Wesley… Does he ever come over to this end of things?”

“Hasn’t yet,” Erin said. “The closest he’s come is Kimberly’s cage. He hasn’t gotten on top of Connie’s or ours.”

“Not that he couldn’t,” Alice said.

“Yeah, he could if he wanted to. If he didn’t want to move the ladder, he could always just go ahead and jump. It isn’t that far between…”

“What ladder?” I asked.

“Our ladder,” Alice said.

“He got it at our house,” Erin explained. “Like everything else, just about. He’s been keeping it handy ever since he put us in the cages. It’s one of his things. He climbs up on top of the cages and sort of… messes around. You know, looks down at us. Teases us. He keeps a box of stuff up there. Things he can drop on us whenever he feels like playing ‘bombardier.’”

“Mostly books,” Alice said.

“He drops books on you?”

“Yeah,” Alice said, “and they can hurt. Even a paperback hurts if it catches you with its spine.”

“Especially a corner of the spine,” Erin added. The deal is, Wesley doesn’t want to bomb us with anything we might use against him. He figures we can’t do much damage with a book.”

“Sometimes, he bombs us with pages,” Alice said. “He’ll rip one out and wad it up, then set it on fire and drop it through the bars.”