Terminal Island (20 page)

“But we don’t have
time
…”

Ruby scoffs, “I’m not leaving this hotel without my daughter.”

Henry very reluctantly lets her sit him on the edge of the bed. Giving in, he tries to steady himself, to relate to his wife what happened as clearly and succinctly as he can. The problem is, as he talks he can feel the inertia of Ruby’s matter-of-fact normalcy dragging like an anchor against his story, undermining the whole mass-murder conspiracy concept and making it seem like the ravings of a lunatic. It doesn’t help that he’s gibbering like one.

Maybe it’s shock, or that he hardly can believe the whole insane business himself, but as he comes to the climax Henry finds himself losing steam, letting the words just peter out:

“—so those two sleazebags we saw at the Casino showed up and…and I stole their ATV, and this other guy was siccing all these dogs on me so I had to get out of there. They had me boxed in—the only way out was to crash the ATV against the railing and kind of…
catapult
myself out over the water, like this. And that’s when I came back here.”

“You wrecked their ATV?”

“Goddamn it, didn’t you hear what I said? They were trying to kill me!”

“But honey…I mean, first of all you’re in there illegally, then you trash the place? It’s no wonder they were mad, but that doesn’t mean they were trying to
kill
you—”

“Oh my God. Have you heard a word I’ve said?”

“Yes,” she says firmly, putting her hand on his arm and fixing her big, sincere eyes on his. “I have. And I believe you’ve obviously had a real scare—it was a close call, okay? I’m here for you one-hundred percent, baby. It’s just hard for me to believe there isn’t a more…
reasonable
explanation for all of this.”

“
Jesus
.”

“Henry. Is it so impossible that in the heat of the moment you let your imagination run a little wild? Hear me out—you
know
you have major issues with this place; I’ve been listening to you for days. You’re a little paranoid, okay? Maybe it’s a post-traumatic stress thing, like you had before. I don’t blame you for it, but can’t you see how easily that can put a sinister spin on stuff that is just ordinary bureaucratic bullshit?”

“This was more than that. Those files—”

“Yeah, so they were keeping their tenant records locked up in an unfinished building. So what? Maybe they’re working on their filing system.”

“Those were more than just tenant records. And the whole place is empty, didn’t you hear me? I’m telling you, it’s all fake!”

“Honey, I’m here for you, I’m listening and trying to be supportive, but…I don’t see how you can be sure of that. Did you check every building? I mean, come on, did you? And even if it was empty, what does that prove? Places close for a lot of reasons: renovations, fumigation, who knows? Maybe they had termites. Just try to look at it from my point of view.” She sighs, shaking her head. “It’s my fault—I
knew
I shouldn’t have let you go in there alone.
Damn it!
Now who knows what’s going to happen—at the very least they’ll probably make us pay for the damages. We’re screwed. We’ll have to pay for a lawyer…shit, this is all we need right now.” She turns her face away from him, starting to cry.

Henry doesn’t know what to say, he wants so badly for her to be right. Suddenly he jumps up, shouting, “Holy shit! I can prove it!” He flings the day-bag off his back and tears open the zipper. “I did what you said—I filmed the whole thing!” But the camera comes out dripping and smashed, as he should have known it would. Defeated, Henry says, “I’m…sorry. But I
swear
to you it’s the truth.”

Handling the wreckage of her expensive camera, Ruby says, “No, I agree with you about one thing: We have to get you the hell out of here as soon as possible, the minute they bring Moxie back. I don’t want you here another minute. If we can sneak off this island scot-free it’ll be a miracle.”

Relieved, Henry nods, not saying anything to jinx it.

They set about packing their things. “Just what we can carry in our day-bags,” Ruby says. “Leave the rest; I don’t even care.” Henry doesn’t argue.

When they are finished, they sit and wait, anxious and jumpy.

“How long have they been gone now?” Henry asks.

“I don’t know. Less than an hour. Those trams are slow.”

“Okay.”

“Now you’ve got
me
all worried. Maybe we should wait downstairs in case they try to call.”

“Okay.”

They shoulder their rucksacks and go down to the lobby, sitting on a spindly wicker bench and leafing through island maps and brochures:
Inland Safari! The Isthmus—Holiday at Two Harbors!

After a few minutes, Ruby says, “You know what? I’ve got that card with her home phone number. I’m gonna just call.”

Yes! For God’s sake, call!
“Good idea,” Henry says.

She gets up and tries the phone at the front desk, dialing several times. To quell Henry’s anxious look, she explains, “Line’s busy.” After a few more attempts, she says with studied calm, “They must have it off the hook,” and sits down.

Henry is vigilant to any sound from outside—the telltale electric hum of a tram, or a baby crying—but there is nothing. Just the swish of the breeze through the entrance. Every few minutes, Ruby tries the phone again, to no use. “How can they leave the hotel unattended like this?” she says, temper flaring. A dusty cuckoo-clock made of seashells and with a caption reading
Life’s a beach
chimes three o’clock—another hour has gone by.

Henry stands up. “I can’t sit here anymore.”

Ruby nods, resigned. “I know. What are you gonna do?”

“I’m going to see if I can find them…or at least somebody who can help us.”

“You mean the police? Maybe
I
should call them.”

“No, not the police. Could I have some of that Motrin?”

“Sure.” She hands him the bottle and he takes a few, swallowing them dry. “Are you gonna be okay?” she asks.

He nods, choking a little on the pills, says, “If I don’t find out something right away, I’ll go to the police myself and lay it all out—it’s ridiculous for us to be huddling in fear like this. I’ve had enough of this crap. Whatever happens, happens, okay?”

“Okay. I wish I could go with you, but they might come back any second.”

“No, one of us should definitely stay here. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

Henry kisses her and they hold tight, then he goes out to the street.

Chapter Twenty-One

BUFFALO

T
he town is quiet as ever, drowsing in the mid-afternoon doldrums.

Siesta time
, Henry thinks. His back has stiffened up from sitting—he feels like someone has beaten him with a baseball bat, but tells himself it’s nothing compared to those first months of rehab. Barely able to get down the porch stairs, he considers calling it off, but that would just mean climbing back up again and worrying Ruby. The Motrin should be kicking in anytime soon.

Moving as quickly as he can, he makes for the waterfront, scanning every side street for movement, for one of those familiar electric trams, picturing the moment as if willing it into being: that blond girl Janet excitedly pointing him out to Moxie as they approach—
There’s your daddy! Here he comes! Wave! Wave to daddy!

But there’s no traffic, nothing stirring at all. The town is as empty as he’s ever seen it. It suddenly occurs to him that he can’t remember when he last saw anyone out on the street…it would have to have been yesterday sometime. Since then there has been a drastic dip in the sense of life. Henry just didn’t notice it earlier, obsessed with finding his mother.

He resists the feeling, not daring to believe it, knowing what Ruby would say.
It’s a quiet place
. But the closer he gets to the center of Avalon, the more obvious it becomes:

The whole town is dead. Not just napping, but deserted in the way of those condos up there, cleaned out and hollow…just like that day. That long-ago day with his mother. The whole place has that same petrified air.

It reminds him of The Pike.

The Pike was a sprawling waterfront amusement park in downtown Long Beach—California’s answer to Coney Island. Once catering to a huge clientele of sailors during World War Two, The Pike (and the whole of downtown) had slowly become decrepit as its customer base dried up, finally shutting down altogether when the fleet left town for good.

During the long summer days when Henry’s mom was off working, he would wander the bleak prospects of the downtown waterfront as if it were his own backyard. The area was a junk-strewn wasteland of condemned buildings, bulldozed fields, and rat-infested stone breakwaters—very much like the vistas of his earliest memories in San Pedro…and thus, strangely comforting.

This was not the glamorous Southern California of popular myth, all movie premieres and white sand beaches. This was the only Southern California Henry knew: acres of spit-blackened sidewalks curing in the sun, with bars and bail-bonds shops like outposts in the wilderness. It was a landscape that was mostly deserted by day, roamed by drunks and derelicts and screaming lunatics by night.

The centerpiece of it all was The Pike. Henry has vague recollections of his mother bringing him there when they lived in San Pedro and the old amusement park was still hanging on by a thread:

The lights and carnival barkers and droning calliope. The Diving Bell. The swooping double-decker Ferris Wheel. The Penny Arcade. The Fun House, with its cracked plaster clowns above the entrance, shrieking recorded laughter (and which, just before the park was demolished, would yield up a mummified human corpse painted Day-Glo orange—the propped-up ghoul passed off all those years as another dummy). All that was still there when Henry’s mom had first brought him to The Pike. But when he went back there by himself the only sound was the wind riffling strings of tattered plastic pennants. While his mother worked, seven-year-old Henry walked the desolate carnival grounds, alone but not lonely, examining the frozen machinery of the Wild Mouse and the Tilt-a-Whirl, peering into the Try Your Luck stands now gutted of balls and bottles and cheap stuffed animals, and thinking that the place was beautiful—it seemed to exist for its own sake, needless of people, as old and crustily organic as anything in nature.

Yes
, Henry thinks now,
Avalon is just like The Pike
.

Every hot-dog stand and game arcade is closed, every door locked as if it’s Christmas in September—even the Sheriff’s Office and Fire Station. But there is no holiday that Henry is aware of; it should be an ordinary weekday, a school and work day. Yet the windows stare blankly back at him, dark and unoccupied.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse
.

He glances behind and his heart lurches.
Not
a creature
—

Back down the street, about half a block away, looms a monstrous, humped figure. Just standing there watching him.

Adrenaline running like quicksilver, Henry shades his eyes to see better, to be sure he is seeing what he thinks he’s seeing.
No
—
it’s gotta be a joke
…

The weird apparition looks about seven feet tall, top-heavy with a shaggy horned head—a bison’s head—that is suspended on a limbless column of overlapping hides, like raggedy plating. Dangling from its horns are strips of flesh that appear to be flayed human skin. A corona of flies swirls around it in the sun, and there are trickles of rank wetness from its eye sockets and nose—the hair under its jaw is slimy with matted blood. As Henry watches, the freakish being glides forward in its cloak of skins, then turns and vanishes between two buildings.

That’s the thing we saw!

There can be no doubt about it—it is the same apparition he and Ruby encountered in the hills: a disgusting, buffalo-headed man.

“What the hell,” Henry mutters, terrified even though he knows it must be nothing but an asshole in a costume—or maybe that’s
why
he’s terrified: Only a crazy person would do something like this. “What the fuck’s going on?”

Chest ringing like an anvil, he hesitantly backtracks to see where the thing went, finding only a trail of blood. It looks like real blood, leading in smears and drabbles down the alley to the next street. He follows it, meaning to chase the son-of-a-bitch down and have it out with him…but that might be exactly what they want him to do. A trick. A trap. Slowing, Henry sees that the blood trail disappears under the door of an unmarked storefront. The window is draped black; there is no way to see inside.

He knows this place from when he was a kid. It was some kind of market then, a secret little shop that had no sign and didn’t advertise in the tourist literature. For all he knows it may still be. Something about the place clangs against his memory—the dreamy recollection of walking by with Christy and seeing a huge green dragonfly trapped inside the window.

What did he glimpse in there? Something that he didn’t understand, that he barely registered except as a place he didn’t belong. He hasn’t thought of this since it happened; it is filed deep with all the other imponderables of childhood. But something bad.

Henry turns around and starts running.

Going as fast as his aching joints will permit, he trots through the middle of town, what would normally be the busiest part, searching for signs of life. He goes past the pizza and ice cream places, the little indoor shopping center, the Post Office. The windows are decorated in a way they never were before, with oddly composed still-lifes of fruit and raw meat and other more random items of plenty set out like offerings, with paper money strung up like bunting.

Everywhere he goes he begins to notice fresh-painted graffiti, the same symbol over and over: a buffalo’s horned head, weeping blood—the stylized face looks half human. Henry scans the beach and the pier. Nothing. He tries to enter the lobby of Arbuthnot’s hotel, the expensive Sand Crab Inn, and finds it dark, the glass entrance sealed.

“Hello?” He jumps the fence into the hotel courtyard and walks down the line of doors, his voice echoing against the building. “I’m looking for a Carol Arbuthnot! Mr. Arbuthnot! Can someone hear me? I have an emergency!”