The Divine World

William Young

The Divine World

Copyright 2011 by William Young

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should find an e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue

Original Short Story Version

Television Pilot Episode

Chapter 1

The UH-1 “Huey” helicopter chopped through the air over the clear blue waters of the Caribbean, the small island from which it had taken off diminishing into a dark smudge on the horizon behind it. On the surface below, it passed over a pleasure boat, and David Arris smiled as he looked down through the door window at the deck of a small yacht. A bikini-clad woman lying on a blanket shielded her eyes to gaze at his helicopter flying above her. Pleasure craft, indeed, Arris thought as he adjusted his course toward a much more malevolent type of surface vessel.

Arris turned his head over his shoulder and looked into the cargo area. Two DEA agents were consulting a map and pointing binoculars out the windows trying to find the day’s target. One of the agents keyed his microphone switch and asked, “Are we on the right course? There’s supposed to be a small chain of islands coming up soon.”

Arris toggled the button on his cyclic stick to engage his mic, “Yeah, we’re on course. Another couple of clicks and we should hit the first checkpoint.”

A couple of minutes passed in silence and the islands in question emerged as dark specks dead ahead of them. The plan was to approach the islands, circle them as if sight-seeing, and then climb back up and look for the Norwegian Tjeld class torpedo boat they were after. The Huey was painted blue and yellow, with a large logo on each side’s sliding cargo door advertising the helicopter as “Island Tours,” but the paintjob was only days old, cover for the mission the government agents and Arris were now flying. Somewhere out amidst the islands of the Caribbean, a half-dozen ships of various sizes were lying in wait for the right moment to move north toward America and unload millions of dollars in illegal drugs.

At least that was what the official mission brief declared. Arris didn’t believe it: the drug cartel operation was too large, the ships too noticeable for this to be the work of a drug cartel. Those guys liked to stay under the radar; the operation Arris was trying to find looked as if it were a private navy on maneuvers, intent on being noticed as if it were sending a message to somebody.

Arris pushed the collective stick down and adjusted the cyclic between his legs, feeling the aircraft descend as he turned toward the little islands ahead, marveling at their emptiness and noting the swirls of fish in the shallow waters off the empty narrow beaches. He circled around a larger island and noticed an oversized bungalow-style house on it. A man and a woman walked out from some tree cover and stared up at the helicopter, their hands shading their eyes from the sun. Arris smiled: everyone always looked up at helicopters.

“I wonder whose private island that is,” Agent Porter asked over the intercom.

“Doesn’t Mick Jagger have an island somewhere out here?” Agent Jones said.

“Jagger? I dunno. Probably,” Porter said.

Arris imperceptibly shook his head as he adjusted the collective and cyclic to gain altitude and change course: envious government bureaucrats. Arris brought the Huey up to 1,000 feet and began scanning the horizon for the target when Jones’ voice broke over the intercom.

“Yo, I think that’s the ship over there on the left, moving left-to-right by that island about a mile away.”

Arris turned and looked, and sure enough, it was the Tjeld torpedo ship, modified to look like a generic cargo vessel. Just then, Agent Porter tapped Arris on the shoulder and pointed out the window.

“We need to make some sort of looping pass-by to confirm that’s what we’re after. Not too close, just so we can see it well enough through the binos,” Porter said.

Arris nodded and stared at the air space. “Alright, I’m going to dip down low over this next series of islands, pull back up to altitude and make a lazy turn toward them that indicates we’re going to make another pass of the islands. Then we’re going to have to pull up and head somewhere else where we can anticipate them, because sitting up here watching them isn’t going to cut it after that. There’s nothing else to look at around here.”

The islands they flew over barely qualified as islands, being little more than lumps of rock and sand with a smattering of scrub grass, retreats only for sea birds. Arris pulled the helicopter up into the air in a turn that brought it within a quarter-mile of the suspect ship. Agent Jones was looking through his binoculars out the cargo doors the entire time and pressed his mic switch.

“Yeah, that’s them, you can see them standing on the back of the ship looking at us.”

Arris furrowed his brows. Everyone always looks at the helicopter … but still.

Agent Porter moved to the window of the helicopter and lifted his binoculars for a view. What he saw astounded him. He failed to key his microphone switch as he shouted out, “A guy just came on deck with an anti-aircraft missile,” but Jones was close enough to hear the muffled shout through his headphones.

“What did you say?” Jones said over the intercom.

“There’s a guy on the deck with binoculars pointed right at us, and there’s a guy standing right next to him with an AA rocket,” Porter said.

Arris turned his head quickly to look out the side window just as the anti-aircraft missile was launched, a quick burst of fire followed by a line of white smoke being drawn through the air directly to his aircraft. Arris pulled the collective stick up to full power and maneuvered the cyclic stick between his legs, trying to turn the helicopter into some sort of defensive posture. There was no chance he’d be able to fly the helicopter behind any cover on the nearby island before the missile hit, so his only chance was to make it miss. Instinctively, he pressed the chaff button on the side of the collective stick and turned his head to look out the window to see if it was deploying.

“Shit!” Arris said to himself as he realized the small metal bits of chaff were not deploying: of course there was no chaff box on the tail rotor boom of his sight-seeing helicopter. He turned the aircraft through the sky for the next few moments and looked through the co-pilot’s window, watching the missile streak closer.

“Hold on tight, this is going to be loud and full of fire,” Arris said over the intercom.

Arris made one last maneuver with the controls to try to shake the oncoming missile, to no avail. It pierced the left side cargo door with a deafening boom before puncturing the ceiling behind the rear cargo wall and ripping it off, quickly sucking the air out of the cabin. The Huey rocked violently in the air, but there was no explosion, no fireball. The red Master Caution light on the dash panel flicked on immediately, followed by a half-dozen other system caution lights, and Arris instinctively reacted to the drop in engine and rotor RPM by slamming the collective stick down and adjusting the other flight controls for an autorotation down to the sea surface.

Arris glanced quickly into the cargo bay while keying the mic switch on the cyclic, but aside from a lot of blood and a left arm, it was empty. Both agents had been blown out of the helicopter. Arris returned his attention to the task of ditching the helicopter and began to broadcast an emergency call on the radio.

“Mayday, mayday, this is Victor Six Echo Niner Five, a sight-seeing helicopter—“ Arris glanced down to his kneeboard to look at his position on the map, but the map was gone, sucked away in the non-explosion. He only knew he was over water, a hundred or so miles north of Anguilla and south of a small chain of sandbars, coral reefs and unpopulated scrub-grass-covered protuberances of ground that barely qualified as islands. He had to say he was somewhere: “— going down in the sea about fifteen clicks south-southeast of the Lorenzo Islands.”

And then Arris put the aircraft in the water, pushed the cyclic stick to the left and felt the helicopter shudder as the blades chopped into the water and forced the transmission to a halt. Seawater rushed in and the weight of the ocean began to pull the aircraft down. Arris unclipped his seatbelt, opened the door and climbed out of the aircraft, frog-paddling away from it and turning to watch it slip beneath the surface of the water, another craft gone to a watery grave. He pulled the cord on his life preserver and felt it inflate against his body, buoying him.

Arris looked around at the vast expanse of sea and wondered if the smugglers were going to investigate their kill, but his mind turned quickly to sharks. He scanned the water for fins and saw none. He looked farther out for signs of the smuggler’s boat and realized the ocean current had already pulled him out of reach of the small islands he had just flown over. He was going wherever the sea took him.

Chapter 2

Gregoire stood on the helipad and searched through the skies, wondering where Arris and the helicopter could possibly be. Arris and his team of agents should have been back hours ago, but nobody knew anything about why they had not yet returned. There was no way they were still out there flying: a UH-1 had about a two-hour flight time and no way of aerial refueling, and there were no plans for in-mission forward-deployed refueling points. Which meant Arris would have had to have already returned. And, yet, he hadn’t.

Gregoire pulled a cigar out of a box of Swisher Sweets in his cargo pants pocket lit it, puffing as he surveyed the base camp. The last of the surveillance boats was just returning and there was a buzz among the many operators as to what had gone on that day, and as the word spread that the helicopter had not returned, speculation spread as to what that could mean. Everyone knew that they were looking into an unusually militarized organization, given the kinds of boats in the operation, and there was plenty of analysis leading to some sort of foul play, although nobody knew what. It was all speculation.

He walked through the encampment and into the tactical operations center, which was abuzz with agents at laptops or on satellite phones. One agent gave Gregoire’s cigar a brief, dismissive glance, but Gregoire shrugged off the unspoken condemnation of his tobacco product.

“Well?” he asked, stopping by the folding table that served as the ops center’s clearinghouse.

The agent looked up at Gregoire and shrugged. “Nothing, yet.”

“Was there a distress call or anything?”

The agent shook his head. “No. Not that anyone’s reported.”

“And it didn’t land anywhere?”

“Not that we know of. Listen, Gregoire, we don’t know anything, and the air traffic control that covers the area he was flying in didn’t have any contact with him after he established initial contact after take off,” the agent said. “And, ATC said he never showed up on radar and he didn’t respond to follow-on radio requests to squawk a transponder code, so we don’t have any idea where he was after he left here.”

Gregoire thought about that for a second. It made no sense. Arris was an experienced pilot with two-thousand or so hours of helicopter time, most of it in the military, and he would not have ignored ATC or not set a squawk code before take-off. He took a puff on his cigar and thought about the options at hand. Already, outside, the Drug Enforcement Agency unit was tearing down the operations center while the other members of his unit, code named Opera, were already gone. Technically, he should’ve left with them, too, but he was breaking company protocol because … because Arris had not returned from the mission and he couldn’t trust the government agents to launch a search for an independent contractor. Not when it would be easier for them to write Arris off as a never-was.

“How many boats do we have?” Gregoire asked.

“Three, why?” the agent asked.

“Let’s crew them and search the area of his flight plan,” Gregoire said. “Maybe they had mechanical problems and had to ditch. They could be floating out there, somewhere.”

The agent looked up at Gregoire with the look of a bureaucrat asked to make a special exemption to the regulations dictating how policy was enacted. And, Gregoire’s team was considered expendable, blacker than black, no resources were to be allocated to it should anything go wrong. Arris, Gregoire, the other members of Opera didn’t exist. Gregoire tapped some ash from his cigar onto the ground and leaned close.

“Two of your guys were on that helicopter,” he said.

The agent nodded slightly, and softened. “We’ve only got until sundown, that’s only a few hours.”

“Well, you crew two boats with your guys and meet your deadline,” Gregoire said, “I’ll take out the third on my own, and if I don’t come back, you can write me off.”

Chapter 3

Arris drifted in the current, staring up at the night sky and the millions – or was it billions? – of stars twinkling above him. He was amazed he hadn’t been eaten by a shark, and after all the hours he’d spent drifting with the current, he’d lost all fear of them. He now wondered how long the inflatable vest he was wearing would last and what drowning would feel like. It was weird what a person would think about, being alone for so long in the ocean, floating, helpless. He had imagined a thousand different scenarios for his rescue and none had occurred.

But he was tired. Dead tired. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness through much of the day as he floated in the water. Maybe he wouldn’t know it if he suddenly drowned? That would be a relief. He wouldn’t have minded not knowing that he’d died. Living was the problem: he was compelled to do it, and out here, bobbing on the ocean, the world could finally take its measure of David Arris, find him wanting, and kill him. It would all be over and he could finally be at peace with his wife and children. That was all he really wanted out of life, anyway, a death from a situation in which there was nothing he could have done to save himself; a scenario where there were no odds, where no amount of preparation could save him because the fighter inside of him loved odds, loved beating them, and if a speck of his soul knew there was a way to win, it was inevitable that he would do everything he could to win. And he didn’t want to fight any longer.

Just then the current shifted and Arris could feel it, a malicious hand beneath the water, pushing him toward something. There was nothing he could do about it but witness it, and when his feet brushed the sand of the ocean floor he thought the impossible, the incredible, that maybe, just maybe, God was looking out for him. A wave crashed over him and he stood up and saw the silhouette of an island. He stumbled forward, staggering through the surf until he was out of the ocean and on dry land. He looked around and realized he was on something, looked back at the ocean and, deep inside his brain, some long-ago memory said something to him about the tides, and he forced himself to walk further inland, and then the soft, comforting surface of the sand called to him and he collapsed in a heap on the ground.

Arris awoke in a fantasy world. He noticed reality was different before opening his eyes, before his final morning dream of reliving the previous day had finished playing out in his mind, before fully realizing he was not soaking wet and sleeping on a sandy beach. He was on a bed, his head lying on pillows, a lightweight down comforter covering him. He opened his eyes and saw a gauzy, white mosquito net falling from the top of the bed and surrounding it. He sat up slowly and looked through the white sheer curtain at the room beyond. Arris was certain he was in a medieval castle of some sort, the kind some half-crazy wealthy Scotsman might have restored as an effort to reconnect with his ancestors.

And, he was naked.

Arris slipped out of the covers and stepped away from the bed, immediately noticing his clothing folded atop a chest of drawers nearby. He picked up the shirt and held it to his nose: it was laundered. He pulled on his flight suit pants – civilian slacks modeled on the bottom half of a military flight suit and made out of cotton instead of Nomex – and pulled on a long sleeve linen button-down shirt.

He stared around the room a moment longer and noticed the glass-paned door on one side. He walked over to it, opened it and stepped outside onto a small veranda that overlooked the jungle canopy of what he assumed to be a small island. A gentle breeze mingled with the sounds of island birds. Arris turned and scanned the side of the building to which the veranda was attached, and it was, indeed, something nearly castle-like, if much more modest in scale: a stone mansion built into the side of the cliff wall of a small mountain. Below him was a perfectly manicured lawn a little smaller than a football field and edged with perfect shrubbery. Beyond that was jungle.

Arris was astounded. He reached down into the calf pocket of his flight suit pants for his pack of cigarettes and was only mildly disconcerted to find they weren’t there – he usually didn’t take them on missions, chewing nicotine gum or, on occasion, using an electronic cigarette instead.

“Ah, you’re awake,” said a sonorous bass voice from behind him. “I hope you had a restful sleep.”

Arris turned and stepped through the doorway back into the guest room. Standing in the middle of the room was a trim, fit 50-ish man with salt-and-pepper hair, a crème linen suit and a blue ascot. For the briefest of instants, Arris thought he must now be in some sort of active dream state, but he knew he had been awake too long and experiencing reality too vividly for that to be the case, so he stepped closer to the man and extended his hand.

“Best night of sleep I’ve had in a while,” Arris said. “I’m David Arris.”

Arris watched as the man raised his right hand slightly in a dismissive gesture toward shaking hands, nodded his head in affirmation of their greeting, and then smiled broadly.

“And I am Doctor Konrad Onorien, your host,” Onorien said. “This is my home, welcome.”

“Thank you for fishing me off the beach last night. Last thing in the world I would’ve expected,” Arris said, wondering at Onorien’s refusal to shake hands.

“Yes, well, the natives made quite a hullabaloo about your arrival last night. It was difficult not to notice something different was happening on the island,” Onorien said. “Breakfast will be ready soon, I hope you’re hungry. We can talk more about your chance appearance here then, if you don’t mind.”

“Hungry? I’m starved,” Arris said.

“Good. Well, I’ll allow you to perform your morning activities in private; there’s a wash closet through that door over there,” Onorien said, motioning toward a wall. “Come down when you’re ready.”

With that, Onorien turned and walked out of the room. Arris stared after him in incomprehension. Arris had no way of making sense of the events that were currently transpiring – hell, of the events that had already taken place – and now he was standing in the guest bedroom of a castle on an island with a puzzling owner. Arris walked back out onto the veranda and stared over the jungle canopy.

“Natives, huh?” Arris said quietly, wondering at the odd choice of word.

Arris spent a few minutes in the bathroom cleaning himself up. It was clear from the moment he had awoken that he had already been bathed before being deposited in the bed, but he washed his face and hands anyway, brushed his teeth with a provided toothbrush, and tamped down his hair by wetting his fingers and running them through it. He looked in the mirror at himself and wondered how he had survived the previous day. His green eyes ran over his shaggy dark blonde hair and day of beard growth in his reflection on the mirror: it was an image he had not thought he would see again. He should be dead, one way or another, not freshening up on some sort of island retreat. If he had still believed in God, he’d have offered some sort of prayer, but that belief had been gone for a while, now, so he just stared at the man reflected in the glass opposite him and wondered why. The man just stared back at him.

Arris walked out of the room and down the hallway, intrigued by the décor. There were gilded frames of artwork he was sure he had seen before, late nineteenth century works he recognized from museum visits with his wife on lazy Sunday afternoons, and curio tables with odd artifacts on them that he was sure he had heard about, but nothing connected with anything he could put a name to. He knew it meant Onorien was wealthy, however, but he had no way to know if it meant Onorien was ostentatious. Arris knew this stuff was not there to impress him but he had no way of knowing if was there to impress anybody or if Onorien were some sort of genuine collector of such things. In his own home, Arris had arranged a collection of black and white photos on the walls of the stairway leading from the first to second floor, pictures of his family in normal moments, not to interest guests but, rather, to reinforce to his family that these random moments in time were the history of the family. Anybody could stop and look at one, remember the event and realize everyone in the house was connected to a common history.

He came to the end of the hallway and surveyed the curving staircase and the highly polished wood banister. Arris smiled to himself for a second, touched the wood, and then noticed a girl at the bottom of the staircase in the rotunda near a set of heavy wooden doors.

“I wasn’t going to slide down on it, honest,” Arris said, smiling broadly.

The woman at the bottom was a light-skinned black girl with shoulder-length curly brown hair and, Arris instantly noticed, the greenest eyes he’d ever seen. He figured her to be in her late teens or early twenties. She looked up at him with incomprehension and said nothing. Arris walked down the stairs and approached her. She took the barest half-step backwards and barely curled her fists, both motions Arris noticed out of a long habit of sizing people up. She was afraid. Or nervous. But ready to fight. Arris smiled at her.

“I’m David Arris,” he said, trying his best to be disarming.

The girl stared at him a moment longer and relaxed slightly. “Nereika,” she said. “You brought us the rare moment of excitement last night, Mr. Arris.”

“Oh, how’s that?” Arris replied.

Nereika made a wave with her hand to indicate the direction in which they were to head and the two started walking down a lengthy hallway, similarly decked out with potentially priceless artifacts and other items of curious interest.

“We don’t often get people washing up on the beach,” Nereika said.

Arris turned his head toward her and smiled. “But you get that? Now, that’s surprising.”

Nereika let out a tiny laugh which she immediately clamped down. It was, Arris thought, evidence that she was trying not to give something away, whatever that might be. It was much in line with the way Onorien had not wanted to shake hands with him earlier, as if he were being evaluated for his potential – danger? - more than taken in as someone in need of help.

“No, actually, we’ve never had anyone wash up on shore,” Nereika said. “That’s what made it so exciting.”

“Well, I’m glad to have made a splash,” Arris quipped.

Nereika just looked at him blankly.

“So, what is it you do here on the island?”

Nereika hesitated, and Arris could tell she was trying to come up with an appropriate answer, something he surmised she had never had to do before judging from her facial expression. She was trying to remain neutral, but Arris could tell she had never been asked such a thing before by the way she furrowed her brows and looked to the side.

“I’m Ma-,” she stopped for an instant and corrected herself, “I’m Doctor Onorien’s understudy slash personal assistant, I guess you could say.”

Arris smiled in an attempt to disarm her. “No, I meant here on the island. I looked out at the island from the balcony of my room and didn’t see any signs of life, or a town. So, I was kind of hoping maybe this was the tourist destination.”

Nereika looked slightly confused by Arris’ comment and started walking down the hallway, motioning for him to follow. “Well, there are beaches, but no tourists. This is a private island.”

“Private, huh?” Arris said. “That’s nice. I don’t suppose you have a plastic tub with spare swim trunks in it, do you?”

Nereika sniffed out a small laugh and turned over her shoulder, “No, I don’t believe we do.”

Nereika stopped at a door and opened it, motioning for Arris to go through. Arris raised his eyebrows in good humor and smiled politely at Nereika before turning in through the doorway into an elaborate dining room. The room was lit by an elaborate chandelier dangling from the ceiling over a long, heavy, ornately carved table. A dozen matching chairs stood along each side of the table. A sideboard laden with silver serving dishes rested against one wall, and the smell of eggs, bacon, and sausage instantly overpowered Arris, who realized immediately how hungry he really was, given the previous day’s events.

“Welcome to the island of Diabolus Visum, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said, striding up along the opposite side of the table. “I hope you’re hungry.”

Chapter 4

Gregoire knelt on the ground over a map, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. He’d been up until just after midnight searching for Arris and the now-presumed-sunk helicopter and had found nothing. He hadn’t slept well, either, plagued by half-dreams that he was letting down his best friend by bunking down even though he knew he would be useless today if he hadn’t caught some sleep. He knew in his heart that Arris would have kept at it, ignored the call for rest. That was Arris. That was what a Green Beret would do. Gregoire sipped a long slug of coffee and tapped the map, wondering where Arris could have disappeared in thin air.

Gregoire heard the sound of footfalls on gravel and looked up to see a DEA agent approaching, dressed in black fatigues.

“Anything?” Gregoire asked.

“Nothing,” the agent said.

“What about the drug runners?”

The agent shook his head. “No sign of them, either. Though, that’s not much of a surprise. The grass strip they were using is about a half-mile inland from here, and if they got the shipment in on schedule, they’d have been out sometime in the middle of last night, long before we got here this morning.”

Whatever the drug cartel had been up to the previous day, it hadn’t involved running drugs to the American mainland. Instead, the ships had spread out through the island chains as if they were searching for something, and a light-duty civilian cargo airplane had made several trips back and forth to a small airstrip outside Miami without ever having unloaded anything. Arris had said it hadn’t seemed like a drug running operation, and Gregoire hadn’t known then what to think. Now, he wondered what the ships were really up to.

The lack of action had spooked the DEA as well, as the agents had spent most of the night trying to figure out what they should do, since nothing had happened and Arris’ aircraft had vanished. The early indications were that the government had told them to fold up camp and return home.

Gregoire pulled a flimsy cardboard box of cigars out of his pocket, tapped one out and lit it. He looked back down at the map, knowing that this island’s airstrip would’ve been the one Arris would have made for in the event of trouble. Everywhere else was water.

“We’re going to find them if we have to check every sandbar in the area, and that could take while,” Gregoire said. “What’d the agency say about getting any aircraft?”

The agent shrugged. “They’re on the way, now. One is coming directly here. It should be here in a couple of hours.”

Gregoire nodded. “Okay, then I’ll take the boat and check the next island over. There’s a dirt strip there that they might have been able to make. Radio me when you’re in the air.”

Chapter 5

Gregoire piloted the boat for just under an hour, scanning the water’s surface for debris, before turning in to the island resort marked on his map. There was no reason to think that Arris would have made it here, given the range of the Huey, but Gregoire wasn’t going to rule out anything in the search for his friend. He puttered the boat into the make-shift marina and brought it alongside the dock before cutting the engine. He hopped out of the boat and began tying it to a cleat when a dockworker approached.

The dockworker paused a few yards short of where Gregoire was bent over and surveyed him, trying, it seemed to Gregoire, to determine how to deal with his arrival. Clearly, the little motorboat on which Gregoire had arrived was not the kind of seafaring craft that normally made it here, as was evidenced by the few yachts that were already tied up. Gregoire looked at his boat for a second and then glanced up at the dockworker.

“The dock is for registered guests, sir,” the man said, trying to be polite and nearly unable to hide his disdain.

Gregoire smiled and stood. “I’m sure it is, but you know what they say, ‘any port in a storm.’”

This confused the dockworker, who made a clear act of scanning the skies for Gregoire. “The weather is excellent today, sir, is there some way I can be of assistance?”

“Maybe,” Gregoire said, moving closer to the worker and making a scene of checking the area out. “Is there an airstrip on this island?”

“Of course, it is how many of the guests arrive.”

“Where is it?”

“About a kilometer inland from here,” the worker said, turning and motioning with his hand, “up this road.”

“Do you know if anybody landed at it recently?” Gregoire asked, closing the distance with the worker to make the man feel uncomfortable with the amount of space between them and rattle him into cooperating. Some people didn’t like to be talked to too closely and would forget their position of authority, and Gregoire had to overcome what he presumed was the dockworker’s primary responsibility: keep out the riff-raff.

The worker took a few steps back. “No,” he said, “I work here.”

Gregoire nodded and started walking up the dock toward the road, the worker following along, confused. “I need to go there. Do you have any transportation for guests?”

“Of course, but you have to be a registered guest of the resort to –,” the worker said, before Gregoire waved his hand to cut him off.

“Okay, okay, it’s just up this road a click or so, got it,” Gregoire said, pulling out his wallet and proffering the worker a US government credit card. “Won’t kill me to walk. Here, take this and fill the tanks on my boat. I won’t be long.”

Chapter 6

Arris and Onorien strolled across the lawn outside the mansion, the late-morning sun shining down on them. Arris was amazed at the perfection of the lawn and shrubbery ringing the perimeter but wondered where the lawn workers were to maintain it. In the few hours he had been awake and living in this fantasy land, Arris had noticed something else: there were no workers, although Onorien off-handedly referenced them. Weirder still, during breakfast, Arris had looked at the chandelier above the table and realized the glass bulbs on it weren’t actual light bulbs, but produced light nonetheless. And, there were no light switches on the walls and no noticeable electrical outlets. If it meant something, Arris was clueless, but, he said nothing. In all the years he’d been in Special Forces, he’d internalized one thing above all, and that was never to reveal learned intelligence to the opposition. Until you knew what your situation was you never told anyone potentially unfriendly what it was you noticed about them, and even then, Arris often kept what he knew to himself. It had saved his life on more than one occasion.

Onorien stopped near a row of hedges and turned to Arris. “You can stay here at my mansion until the next supply ship arrives. Until then, feel free to explore the mansion, wander the grounds, whatever you feel you need to do to pass the time. I caution you about wandering off the grounds, though. Most of the island is uninhabited jungle, but you’ll want to be careful of the natives, should you come in contact with them, which I wouldn’t advise.”

“Why’s that?” Arris asked, again noticing the odd word choice of “natives” in Onorien’s warning.

Onorien stopped walking and paused. He stared at the tops of the jungle beyond the shrubbery wall, considering his answer. Arris watched the man for some sort of physical “tell” that might alert him to the admonition against meeting the “natives,” but Onorien gave nothing away. Onorien turned, faced Arris and gave a slight shrug.

“They are the descendents of a Dutch slave ship that sank off shore of this island in 1802,” Onorien said, finally. “They are the result of a mixture of the Dutch seamen and Africans who were able to make it ashore, and they have lived quite primitively ever since. None of them have ever been known to leave the island successfully, and over the decades, the resultant hybrid population adopted an odd mixture of African and Dutch cultures, a combination that has poisoned their world view and made them hostile to those of us with fairer complexions, despite the fact that they are lighter skinned as a result of the circumstances of their being marooned on this island.”

Arris thought this odd. “You’ve had problems with them?”

Onorien nodded. “On occasion, though they mostly keep to themselves. But you’re better off steering clear should you encounter them.”

Arris was suddenly dispirited. He wasn’t on an exotic beach resort, but, rather, a private island owned by a recluse apparently eager to be rid of him. Not that Arris wasn’t eager to get off the island; he was, given the circumstances that led to his arrival on it. There would be people looking for him, at least until sometime later that day when they’d call off the search and write him off as dead.

“When does the next supply ship arrive?” Arris asked.

Onorien turned toward Arris and gave a barely-noticeable inclination of the head, meant to convey sympathy. “Next Friday.”

Arris sighed inside. Ten days. Arris wondered if he’d have been “buried” by then and what everyone would do when he showed up, alive. That made him smile. Would they bury an empty casket or just go with a memorial service? What on earth would he be remembered for, he wondered. Almost everything he’d ever done that he thought memorable was classified by the United States military or already buried in the ground. For an instant, he thought of his wife and sons, and then he remembered something and kicked himself for not having thought of it hours ago, when he woke up.

“Oh, yeah, I should have had a survival vest on me when you found me last night,” Arris said, “I’d like to get that back, if I can.”

Onorien cocked his head slightly. “A survival vest? I’m not sure what that would be.”

“Eh, it’s a nylon and mesh vest with a lot of pockets on it, each one containing various survival tools like a flashlight, flares, first aid kit,” Arris said, not wanting to over-describe the contents.

Onorien shook his head slightly. “You had no such vest on last night when we found you. Perhaps the natives who found you first took it. Why? Is it important, somehow?”

Arris shrugged. The “natives” found him first? “Only to me. There’s a radio in it that I could use to get a signal to anybody who might be looking for me.”

“There will be people looking?” Onorien said, turning and casting his gaze away.

“Well, only for a little while longer,” Arris said. “You know, you really should look into installing a telephone or ham radio or something. It could come in handy in a situation like this. Or an emergency.”

Onorien smiled. “I have phones and the Internet in my home in Florida. When I’m here, I like to be in total isolation.”

“Just tell me you have television.”

Onorien let out a small laugh. “No, but I do have an excellent library.”

Chapter 7

Arris concluded after a few minutes of standing in the library that it contained almost nothing written after 1960, so far as he could tell from his brief perusal of the shelves, but it did contain a lot of books. A visitor in 1960 might have considered it to be one of the most extensive private collections of fiction and non-fiction in existence at the time, given the sheer number of leather bound early editions of Victorian literature lining the shelves. Arris had no way to be sure, but he thought the entire collected works of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Jane Austen, and George Eliot were represented.

Oddly, the library did include what Arris took to be full collections of several modern-day thriller writers and everything Stephen King had written, including the pseudonymous works. That stuck out like a sore thumb because most of the King books were paperbacks while everything else was either hardcover or leather-bound. Onorien had either come to King late in the writer’s career or purchased somebody else’s collection at a yard sale.

Arris pulled out a hardcover first edition of To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway and opened it. On the blank liner page inside was an inscription, “Konnie, you can’t have all, but never stop trying, Ernie.” Arris shrugged and put the book back on the shelf.

He worked his way along the shelves, passing through hundreds of books on history, archaeology, anthropology, ornithology, medical tomes and other scientific subjects until coming to a collection of works he found curious: The Transmutation of Base Metals, Forged Metals and the Divine Aspect, and Alchemy: Lead & Gold. There were many others. Clearly, Onorien had a wide range of reading interests.

“So, have you found anything good to read, Mr. Arris?” said Nereika from behind him.

Arris turned and shrugged. “Eh, your boss has a pretty extensive collection of books here, but not much in the way of stuff I like to read,” Arris said. “And, anyway, I was thinking of heading down to the beach to see if I can find some of the equipment I should’ve come ashore with. Care to join me?”

Chapter 8

Arris and Nereika walked out of the jungle and onto the sand of a narrow beach. Just emerging from the quiet of the jungle to the noise of the beach was an event; Arris always forgot how noisy the sea was where it crashed against land, an unstoppable force assailing an immovable object. Arris surveyed the beach generally, scanning quickly to see if the vest was obvious, just lying somewhere in the open. It wasn’t. He turned to Nereika and noticed she seemed on edge. She was scanning the jungle line with her eyes while doing her best to appear relaxed.

“Do you have any idea where I came ashore?” Arris asked.

Nereika shook her head. “No,” she said. “The islanders found you and moved you. If they hadn’t made such a ruckus last night, you might have ended up with them instead. But we heard them and came down.

“How did you end up in the ocean in the first place?”

Arris shrugged. “I fly a helicopter tour of a series of islands so that honeymooners and the like can see the beauty of the Caribbean in a way very few people ever will. I fly them over coral reefs, the odd waterfall, interesting beaches and that sort of thing. But, I had engine trouble and had to ditch my aircraft in the sea.”

Nereika made a look of astonishment. “What about your passengers? What happened to them?

Arris smiled. “I was on the way to pick some up when it happened,” Arris said, pushing thoughts of the two agents aside. “Hey, look at that!”

Arris trotted over to a spot where his survival vest lay on the sand, its contents scattered around it. He kneeled down and began examining the damage. Alongside the vest’s contents were the various items from his pants’ pockets, and he scooped up his wallet and keys and stuffed them into his pockets. As he moved the vest he noticed his ankle holster and Kahr P380 semi-automatic pistol beneath it, which came as a surprise: he had assumed Onorien had removed it from him the previous night after undressing and bathing him but Arris had not asked about this morning as a courtesy for Onorien’s hospitality and a desire to not to appear unduly concerned about his personal safety. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and noticed Nereika’s attention was fixed on the jungle and wrapped the vest around the pistol. Whoever had gone through his possessions had taken almost nothing – his survival knife and whetstone and the small coil of steel fishing line and hook were missing - but had gone through everything.

“Well, what the hell were they looking for?” Arris said softly.

“This is your missing property?” Nereika asked.

“Yeah,” Arris said, sorting through the items. “Aww.”

“What?”

Arris held up the emergency radio, which had been broken open and was now useless. “What the hell would make anyone break this open and tear it apart? It’s just a radio.”

Nereika looked at it for a moment. “Maybe they thought there was something inside it.”

“Yeah, there is: wires and circuits and nothing useful to anybody other than as a fully-functioning radio,” Arris said. “Are you trying to tell me the ‘natives’ on this island are so primitive they’ve never seen a radio before?”

Nereika looked down at Arris and nodded, slowly. Arris wanted to drop his jaw in disbelief, but didn’t, only because he was trying to maintain an image of himself as a harmless castaway to his host and hostess. Still, it didn’t make sense to him on any level: the natives took his knife and fishing tackle, destroyed his emergency radio and left behind a fully-functioning pistol. Maybe they didn’t know what a firearm was either?

“This is the Caribbean,” Arris said. “You don’t get visitors here?”

“This is a private island, Mr. Arris, the only visitors are invited guests,” Nereika said, her eyes flitting briefly from Arris to the tree line.

Nereika started walking away from Arris, her posture changing markedly, as if she were assuming some sort of martial arts position, ready to take or give a move depending on the sudden disposition of the situation. Arris watched her closely as she moved sideways along the jungle line, observing her and assessing her skill level. Little better than a novice. Arris hesitated a moment longer as he watched Nereika, wondering what could focus her attention so, and then quickly took the ankle holster and P380 out of his folded vest, slipped the weapon quickly into the holster and snapped the leather band around his right ankle, rapidly lifting and lowering his pants leg as his heart beat quickly. Arris paused, caught his breath, and returned his attention to Nereika. She was still staring into the jungle.

“What? Is there something I should know?” Arris asked as he stood and walked toward the girl. “Is everything okay?”

Nereika snapped her head over her shoulder very quickly and said, “It’s a trap.”

Arris turned his gaze from Nereika to the jungle: all was quiet. Then Nereika tightened her stance and the world around them erupted in a blaze of crackling static. Pop! Pop! Bang! Pop! Shazizzz-Bang! Crack! Pop! Zizz!

Arris dropped to his knees amid the tiny explosions. They seemed to emerge out of nowhere as sudden bursts of fiery light, giving way to small trails of smoke that were quickly decimated by the sea breeze. And for the first few moments, there were dozens of them per second, creating a near-deafening cacophony. Nereika had backed up several steps and appeared dazed, uncertain what she was facing, which only confused Arris, since Nereika had just told him moments earlier that they had fallen into a trap.

Pop! Pop! Sizzle! Bang! Bang! BANG BANG BANG! Arris scanned the jungle line a moment longer as the noise intensified. For all the light and noise from the explosions, Arris couldn’t tell if they emitted any shrapnel. The tiny bursts of flame occurred all around him and he had felt nothing, not even heat. He remained in a crouch and looked up at Nereika, who was still backpedaling from the jungle, her face a mixture of confusion. She looked down at him.

“Run!” she yelled, pointing to the path they had used to come to the jungle.

The sound intensified even more, and the amount of fireballs increased, causing Arris to shield his eyes and look downward at the sand for a moment. And then he heard what sounded like electric current sizzling through the air, a definite crackle with what sounded like endpoint bursts and … mild groans of pain? Arris looked up.

“Run,” she yelled, “to the estate grounds. I’ll be right behind you.”

Another round of marble-sized flashes glittered in the air around them and Arris figured it was better to take her advice and run rather than figure out what the hell was going on. He took off across the beach and dashed through the jungle, the sounds of bursting flashbulbs mixing with the coursing of electrical surges. After covering several dozen yards through the jungle, Arris popped through the pristine hedgerow onto the manicured lawn of the estate, where he turned and instinctively got into a martial arts ready stance of his own, prepared to fight. Then he remembered the small pistol on his right ankle and bent down toward it, thought better of it, and stood back up, trying to appear unfazed by the events of just moments ago.

Another second passed and Nereika crashed through the shrubbery, caught herself up, and stared back over the top of the shrubs at the jungle beyond. She caught her breath, and relaxed into a normal standing position. Arris, uncertain about what he had just experienced, made a gesture toward the jungle.

“What the hell was that?” Arris asked.

“The natives,” Nereika said.

Arris stared at her for a moment. “That was the natives?”

Nereika stared at him for a moment and then looked back into the jungle.

“All I saw were a bunch of miniature explosions in mid-air,” Arris said. “I thought these ‘natives’ were primitive types.”

“They are,” Nereika said. “Come on, I have to tell Onorien.”

“What would they have been shooting at us? Because, I didn’t hear any gunfire and that certainly wasn’t any kind of explosive device I’m familiar with,” Arris said.

Nereika turned and looked at him blankly. She walked by.

“And, how did you know it was a trap?”

Nereika stopped and turned, pausing for a long moment as she regarded Arris. “I could just tell. I should’ve realized sooner that they left your equipment on the beach as a lure.”

Chapter 9

Ten minutes later, Arris and Nereika were in the study of Onorien’s mansion, retelling the story of the beach. The room was dominated by a large wooden desk piled high with books, paraphernalia and items Arris figured were some sort of collectibles, but there were no photographs, which Arris thought odd. This was the kind of room in which most people had photographs of the important or meaningful events from their lives and Onorien had none, just some framed oil paintings of still lifes and one of a castle on a hill. Onorien listened patiently as Nereika recounted the events, asking no questions as she detailed the precautions she had – unawares to Arris – taken on the trip through the jungle and onto the beach. Arris watched the dynamic of the two carefully, noting that Nereika was doing everything she could to assure Onorien that she had adhered to some rules set that had been established for trips outside of the mansion’s grounds. Arris was certain that Nereika had been told to observe and guard him, though he had to read between the lines of Nereika’s re-telling of the events of that morning to come to that conclusion.

There was something in the dynamic of the relationship between the two that Arris couldn’t put his finger on, but it did not exactly describe the condition of a professor and a student. And certainly, Arris concluded, Nereika was no mere “understudy slash personal assistant,” as she had described herself. She was something else entirely, if Onorien’s demeanor was anything to go by.

“So, what the hell were those things they were shooting at us?” Arris asked after Nereika had finished her story. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

Arris had to stop himself short on that last line, almost giving himself away as someone who’d seen something more than he wanted to let on to. He had, of course, seen about everything that could explode, shoot or blow up; he just didn’t want to give any information up about what kind of person he really was, and not because he suspected Onorien was in cahoots with the drug runners, but because Arris was starting to come to the conclusion he was on some sort of hermitage. What kind, he hadn’t a clue.

Onorien made the barest of shrugs. “Well, Mr. Arris, they are laaien bols, the Dutch for, I believe, ‘fire globes.’  They are small parchment sacks filled with a homemade explosive material and, sometimes, bits of shale or tiny pebbles that the natives will fire at you with a slingshot. They are more of a firework than anything else, though, I suppose, enough of them could harm you.”

Arris nodded. “Any idea why they’d bother attacking me – you … us – at all? If they found me washed up on the beach, couldn’t they have just done away with me then? Why go through the trouble of setting some sort of trap?”

It made no sense to Arris, none of it, and he wasn’t confident that Onorien would have a good answer. Not considering that Arris was on a private island in the Caribbean with a clan of slave descendents living in isolation on one end of it. Neighborly folks would’ve settled any disputes long ago, especially given the apparent time frame the ‘natives’ had lived on the island.

Onorien let out a slight sigh. “I have light skin, Mr. Arris, and so, I suppose, the natives believe I am here to enslave them. While the natives are a mixture of Dutch and African ancestries, it is the oral traditions of the Africans which have dominated their culture over the last two centuries so they see me as someone who would seek to enslave them yet again.

“This is not the case, I assure you. I have made attempts over the years to try to make peace with them, to integrate them into some sort of greater island community. Indeed, they pretty much ran the entire island until I showed up some years ago to reclaim my family’s property and make improvements to it. They resented that, thinking that the island was theirs, not my family’s, and so, in the initial years, there were feuds not unlike that which you experienced today, attempts to scare me off the island, to make me abandon the home that my ancestors had established,” Onorien said, walking about the room.

“I told them to stay if they wanted to, that I would not kick them off, that they were free to remain here, on the island, so long as they agreed to the bargain that they stayed on their end, and I on mine,” Onorien said. “And, for quite some time now, that has been the case. But they have been growing increasingly restless over the last few years, as if they have begun to tire of our arrangement. They make frequent incursions into my area of the island and, on most days, they have someone stationed down on the beach, keeping tabs on me. This is how they discovered you, Mr. Arris, when you walked out of the surf and collapsed on my beach.

“But none of them have attempted to actually contact me in quite some time, nor have they tried to leave the island. So, I have no idea what motivates their activities. I do know, however, that they won’t intrude upon the grounds, so you are perfectly safe so long as you remain behind the hedgerows.”

Arris looked around the room, following Onorien as he told his short story. “So, why didn’t they just slit my throat on the beach last night or throw spears at us today? If they’d wanted to kill me – us - they had the perfect chance when they ambushed us. They didn’t need to use pyrotechnics.”

Arris said this while eyeing Nereika and he noticed she watched Onorien with a look of total curiosity, as if she were intensely interested in knowing the details of the answer to his question, too. Onorien took no notice of her and made a disinterested face.

“Perhaps that is the Dutch in them, Mr. Arris, restraining them from unnecessary brutality,” Onorien said.

Chapter 10

Gregoire had abandoned the road for the underbrush before nearing the island airstrip, certain anyone of interest would be watching the only avenue of approach to it. Depending on the terrain, which was mostly flat island scrub brush and sand, he approached either crouched over or in a low-crawl, trying to remain unseen. He had no idea if the drug smugglers he and his team were after were still here but if they were responsible for the disappearance of Arris’ helicopter it seemed best to play it safe.

When he arrived at the airstrip, he instantly recognized the hulking Twin Commander 1000 airplane that his group had been monitoring, only now almost certainly on its return trip. He pulled out a small pen-sized telescope from his shirt pocket and scanned the area through it, noting several men milling around the plane, acting as not-so-unsuspicious guards. Gregoire smiled: the muscle never hid, the power of weaponry overcoming discretion mixed with a desire to want to instill fear in outsiders.

Gregoire looked around the rest of the airstrip for any outliers, more seasoned superiors on the edges performing over-look duties, and saw none. Still, one had to be careful. Gregoire dropped what little military kit he had carried with him, slipped his Glock 27 .40 caliber pistol under his waistband and untucked his shirt to conceal it.

He made his way around a corner of the building and approached the front of the small terminal, a dressed-up cinderblock structure with large glass windows and a lounge with comfortable furniture inside. He approached the front door, made a small show of checking his watch and scanning the area, and stood still. A car drove up the road and came to a stop near a pair of guards standing nearby; a moment later, a man disembarked the aircraft and strode over to the car.

Gregoire paused for a moment as he watched the man walk from the aircraft. There was something off about him, as if he didn’t quite belong with the others. After a moment, Gregoire realized the man was dressed differently, the man’s clothes an amalgamation of Western and Arabic, a white-and-brown checkered scarf loose around his neck. Gregoire noticed a scabbard attached to the man’s waist from which protruded what appeared to be a conductor’s baton. Gregoire’s eyes flitted across the others and none of them matched the man’s dress style. Weird, Gregoire thought.

“So, Ahmet, how did it go?” a man inside the car asked, in Arabic.

“Without a hitch, so far as we can tell,” Ahmet said, also in Arabic.

Gregoire listened intently while pretending to check his watch and look around as if he were confused. Gregoire was fluent in Arabic, French, English and Spanish, though he never let on to this to those who did not already know. The two guards standing near the car were both now glancing frequently at Gregoire. His time was running out.

“I heard there was a problem,” the man in the car said.

“The helicopter?” Ahmet asked. “Not a problem. Jose said Pablo spotted men with binoculars in the cargo bay watching their boat, so they shot it down.”

“I heard the missile didn’t explode,” the man in the car said. “That’s a problem.”

Ahmet shrugged. “It didn’t explode, but it the helicopter and it crashed into the sea; everyone on the boat saw it go down.”

“How does it not explode? We just bought those missiles,” the man in the car said.

“Yes, but Strela-3s are old,” Ahmet said. “We need Stingers if we want to be certain, the Russian stuff can be crap even if it’s new.”

“What about our other problem?”

Ahmet shrugged and made a gesture of supplication with his hands. “I’m heading out to meet them on their island later today. They say they have a way of finding him.”

“Did they say how?” the man in the car asked.

“Only that he has something of theirs that will lead them to him,” Ahmet said, “but they need one of us to cast a locator on something for it to work.”

The man from the aircraft now noticed the two guards watching Gregoire, and nodded with his head for them to check him out. Gregoire watched them approach and tried to smile in a disarming manner.

“Can we help you?” the short man with a thin moustache asked Gregoire, in Spanish.

Gregoire cocked his head to the left slightly and tapped his watch, “I’m waiting for the plane from Miami, is this the plane from Miami?” he asked, speaking French.

The two guards looked at each other in bewilderment.

Gregoire tapped his watch and then pointed at the plane, continuing in French, “I’m waiting for a friend. He’s coming in on the flight from Miami. Do you know if this is the flight from Miami?”

The man from the airplane had overheard this exchange and now approached Gregoire, stopping in front of the two guards and eyeing Gregoire up for a moment, quickly concluding the skinny black African was harmless.

“Do you speak Spanish,” Ahmet asked in Spanish.

Gregoire shrugged, raised the palms of his hands and asked in French, “Do you speak French?”

Ahmet looked briefly at the two guards, who made faces that indicated they had no idea what Gregoire was saying, and turned to him and asked in near-perfect English, “Do you speak English?”

Gregoire nodded and spoke uncertainly, “I speak, but my word list is not so big.”

“Can I help you?” the man asked.

“I wait for plane from Miami. My friend is on it. Do you know if plane here is from Miami?” Gregoire asked, slowly, and motioned toward the Twin Commander.

Ahmet shook his head. “No, this is not the plane from Miami, there are no passengers on it. No friend, not the Miami plane.”

Gregoire nodded enthusiastically and smiled broadly, “Merci, thank you.”

Gregoire turned and entered the building, knowing they would be watching him through the glass windows. He made a show of trying to locate some sort of information – paperwork, a bulletin board, anything – that might make it seem as if he were looking for an arrivals schedule before he noticed a rear exit. He walked over to it and pushed through the door.

Outside, he walked quickly into the woods, scooped up his gear and dashed for concealment. A moment later a guard rounded each corner of the building and stopped, scanning through the trees for Gregoire. They looked at each other, met by the rear door, and entered, apparently thinking he might have gone back inside. Gregoire began the slow process of backing away from the building, moving through the underbrush, constantly stopping to hide and scan to see if he were being pursued. After ten minutes, he concluded they were not following him and made his way back to the docks.

The dockworker approached him with a clipboard and a bill for the gasoline. “Find what you were looking for, sir?”

Gregoire nodded, “More or less, you could say. Thanks for the gas; I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.”

The worker nodded and walked away. Gregoire hopped into the boat and pulled out a satellite phone.

“This is Opera,” Gregoire said when connected, “I need to talk about the arrangements for the soloist.”

“A problem with the snack bowl?” was the reply.

“Yeah, he only wants red M&Ms,” Gregoire said, finishing the authentication sequence.”

“What have you got?”

“Apparently, they were shot down by the smugglers. They had some sort of MANPAD – I think he said it was an old Russian missile of some sort,” Gregoire said. “But the warhead didn’t explode, it just crashed into the helicopter and they went down in the sea. Which could mean anything, but I’m going to bet Arris was able to get it down safely.”

And if that were the case, Gregoire was certain Arris would’ve gotten himself and the agents out of the aircraft before it sank. Somewhere, out there, his friend and two DEA agents were floating, waiting for help, and Gregoire was determined to find them.

Chapter 11

Arris had spent the rest of the afternoon bored out of his skull in Onorien’s study, picking books off the shelves and flipping through them, not at all interested in reading. He’d spent some time poking around the mansion, certain that there had to be a phone line somewhere, or an Internet connection, or some modern-day way of communicating with the outside world, but hadn’t found anything. Well, not nothing, in any case. The house was well-lit with wall sconces and overhead chandeliers in the rooms and hallways, but Arris had noticed there were no electric plug outlets anywhere. The mansion was fully electrified but, so far as Arris could tell, there was no evidence of electrical wiring.

This is when it had dawned on Arris to wonder how a remote island not connected to anything had electricity at all. He searched through the study for an “on/off” switch for the overhead light and found none, which led him to determine that there were no wall outlets, either. But each time he left the study to try to look around the house, Nereika somehow appeared from around a corner or from some room and asked him if he needed something, and no matter how politely and insistently he said he was fine, she remained nearby, attending to some non-essential activity that led Arris to believe she was tasked with keeping tabs on him.

Finally, frustrated with his inability to snoop around, he had pulled a copy of The Last Patriot by Brad Thor from a shelf in Onorien’s study, retreated to the guest room he’d been assigned and spent the afternoon reading it, wondering who in their right mind believed covert operations worked the way thriller writers depicted them. If only it were that exciting, Arris thought. Covert work was tedium mixed with boredom, most of the time, with the occasional two minutes of action. And, the guy never got the girl because there was never a girl to be gotten. Not in real life. Arris put the book down and, for a moment, wished his life were half-as-interesting as that of Scot Harvath’s.

Nereika fetched him for dinner, and led Arris into a different dining room than the one he had eaten in at breakfast. This one was larger and more ornate, which baffled Arris, given the size and grandeur of the other. Not to mention the fact that Arris wondered why there was a need for two such rooms.

“Can I get you a drink, Mr. Arris?” asked Onorien from behind Arris.

Arris turned and smiled. “How’s your martini?”

“Not as good as Nereika’s, though I won’t give you the opportunity for comparison,” Onorien said, nodding to Nereika, who quickly made her way to a bar cart in a corner of the room. “How was your afternoon?”

Arris shrugged. “I spent the day in your library trying to find something to read. Dickens and dead Russians aren’t exactly the kind of books you take to the beach, and I’ve never been much of a thriller reader, at least not the ones about spies.”

Onorien made a slight face indicating weariness. “I don’t read much fiction anymore, at least not the newer writers, I find most of the stories they tell to be mundane or trite. So, I read thrillers just to pass the time because they’re quick to get through and don’t linger afterwards, begging bigger questions about the world.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got quite the collection of Stephen King,” Arris said.

“I find his take on the supernatural world to be, shall we say, incurious?” Onorien said with a smile.

Arris made a gesture off the walls of the room, but indicating more than just the room. “So, what is this place?”

“My retreat from the modern world. A place I can go to get away, clear my head and concentrate on real life without the hassles of automobiles, crowded sidewalks and strip malls,” Onorien said.

“You get much peace here with neighbors like the ones you’ve got?”

Onorien waved his hand dismissively. “They are not all like that. Most of them, like the one’s who found you, are peaceful, ordinary people eking out a living by fishing and enjoying the bounties a tropical island can provide.”

“Still–“

Onorien made tiny shake of his head. “Even the malcontents pose no danger to you here, and, when I am out and about on the island, they are little more than a trifle.”

Arris thought that was an odd thing to be told, and was curious to follow up on it when Nereika bore a silver tray over to them with a pair of ice cold martinis on it. They each took one and Arris, grateful for the alcohol, took a long, sustained sip of the chilled liquor. Suddenly, the world was civilized and right.

“How long have you been here on the island?” Arris asked. “This building is quite the structure.”

“Yes, well, the island has been in my family’s hands for about two-hundred years. Who knows why they came here and settled it, there’s really not much to it and no way to farm it in any meaningful way. Initially, this area where the mansion is was a collection of small houses, a compound, if you will, that the first few generations used as a base of operations for what I assume were fishing trips,” Onorien said.

“This mansion was actually built at the end of the 1800s by my great-grandfather, after all of the rest of my ancestors had given up on island life.”

“It’s kind of big for just you and Nereika,” Arris said.

“Yes, it is, although there are a few others here on staff when we’re here,” Onorien said. “It was used as a normal home by my family until about thirty years ago, when the last of my immediate family died and it was left to me.”

“You don’t have family of your own?” Arris asked.

“No, I do not. You?”

Arris felt a twinge inside at the question. He had only been making small talk, not trying to extract personal information from Onorien, but he had just set himself up to answer a question that he normally worked assiduously to avoid having to talk about.

“I had a family,” Arris said plainly. “My wife and kids died a couple of years back … it made me realize the urgency of life.”

“I’m sorry to hear of your loss. How did your life change?”

Arris took a long sip from his drink, felt the icy liquid drain down his throat, and looked at Onorien. “I bought a helicopter and started doing island tours. I fly honeymooners around the islands and let them see the stunning waterfalls, lush jungles and the scores of sharks swimming in the shallows just off the beaches. At least I did until yesterday.”

Dinner turned out to be a rather ostentatious collection of dishes, including a roasted pheasant, saffron-infused risotto, a tasting menu featuring some artisan parmesan cheese Arris had never heard of and a handful of bottles of various Barolo wines, none of which registered with Arris. He wasn’t a fine foods type of man, although he certainly liked to eat well. It was just that his life had centered around simple, quick foods that could be poured out of a box or scooped out of a can, plus grilled or fried meat. If Onorien were trying to impress Arris, it was lost on him.

Chapter 12

Gregoire’s boat idled on the ocean waves, its engine a dull purr. He was studying a series of maps, having already marked which islands he had visited. Also on the map he had drawn a small circle around an area where he thought it most likely Arris had ditched the helicopter. Plus, he had sketched out current patterns where men in flotation devices were likely to drift. There was a lot of ocean to search. His satellite phone trilled on the bench behind him.

“This is Opera,” Gregoire said, already certain the signal was secure.

“Gregoire, this is Agent Shepard,” the man on the other end said. Shepard was the head of the DEA contingent and the mission leader.

“What can I do for you?” Gregoire fished out a thin cigar from his cargo pants pocket, tucked it between his lips and flicked his Zippo aflame.

“It’s been more than twenty-four hours and we’ve got nothing so far, so it doesn’t look very good for us,” Shepard said. “Higher echelon wants us to pull the plug on this and bring our assets home.”

Gregoire stared down at the map. “I think we’ve been looking in the wrong areas. I’ve been studying the currents around the area where the helo went down, and we’ve been searching too far north of the probable crash site. We’ve basically wasted the day.”

“That may be, but we can’t stay out here any longer,” Shepard said. “Higher echelon is worried if we stay out in the field too much longer the cartel may notice us and blow our whole op, so we’re bugging out as soon as we reel everything in.

“We contacted your company about your situation, and they’ve arranged to have a Coast Guard cutter begin searching sometime after oh-three-hundred, but we’ve got to get out of here ASAP,” Shepard said. “Sorry.”

“Two of those lost are your guys,” Gregoire said, not out of an attempt to play a sympathy card – he knew enough to know never to try something like that – but because he couldn’t believe mission anonymity would trump personnel retrieval.

“Yeah, not my call. Believe me, it burns me up inside, but we all have to answer to somebody.”

Gregoire stared around him at the 360-degree panorama of water, the sun settling down toward the curvature of the horizon behind him, a blaze of reds and oranges slowly melting into deep blues in front of him. Soon, it would be dark, with only the stars casting light.

“I’m going to keep the boat, then,” Gregoire said. “I’ll drop it off in Miami when I’m done with it.”

Chapter 13

Outside of Onorien’s compound, three of the island’s natives crouched just on the other side of the hedgerow that marked the area into which they would be best off not entering. The thought had not actually crossed their minds, and the only people who ever went beyond the hedgerows were those who inhabited the mansion and those taken into the mansion. The three men gripped their spears nervously, knowing how close they were to mortal peril, how quickly and unexpectedly death could come to anyone who strayed – intentionally or accidentally – onto the manicured grass.

The three were all well-versed in the tales of the mansion, although most were crepuscular visions infused with adrenaline and wrapped in fear, making them unreliable as factual accounts. Only Thijmen, the eldest of the three men, had actually witnessed anything from start-to-finish, and even he could not understand what he had seen. One moment several years ago when Nereika had been taken into the mansion by the white-haired white man, Geert, her older brother, had run across the lawn in an attempt to rescue her but had turned into a pile of black charcoal and ash after he had been engulfed in a bright purple flash of fire and light. One moment, Geert was flesh and blood, filled with life and shouting for the return of his sister, the next he was being lifted into the air by the breeze, tiny bits of fluffy ash dispersed by the wind.

Thijmen had frozen in place and watched in sheer disbelief; there was no explanation at hand. His best friend had been there, and then wasn’t. Nereika had been taken inside, willingly, it seemed, after she had encountered the white-haired man on the beach while searching for sea shells. Geert and Thijmen had been frolicking in the surf, having seriously misjudged how close to the mansion grounds they were, an error Thijmen had never made again. Every square inch of this end of the island had been etched onto his brain in the moments following Geert’s spectacular death.

“Do you think he knows we’re here?” Willem asked, his eyes darting nervously through the early evening gloom.

“I’d assume he knows we’re here, so we shouldn’t linger long,” Thijmen said and shrugged, looking around the jungle. “He always seems to know when we’re here.”

“I say we just sneak in and kill the bastard,” Pieter said. “Who the hell is this man? How many of us will he take into his mansion, never to be seen or heard from again? What of Dedrick? How long until he becomes just another one of us stolen from the jungle?”

Thijmen glared at him. “We see Nereika all the time, so there’s no reason to think the worst has come to him. It’s only been a couple of days. Besides, are you going to be the one that tests the grass?”

All three of them turned and stared at the lawn. All were certain it was deadly. While Thijmen and Willem stared up at the mansion, Pieter grabbed a small rock and lobbed it through the air. It landed with a soft thud on the grass and rolled a foot before stopping. Thijmen and Willem both held their breath with fear, their eyes wide with disbelief and apprehension.

“Pieter,” Thijmen hissed. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

Pieter snorted quietly. “It’s only grass, Thijmen, and that man is only a man, no matter what the legends say.”

“You’re betting our lives on that, Pieter,” Willem said softly, scanning the mansion for signs of movement inside. There was nothing.

“He’s the reason we’re all trapped on this island, and you know it,” Pieter said. “We don’t know how, but it can only be him. He keeps us here so that he can kidnap us at his leisure and take us into that mansion for whatever evil it is he’s up to, and you both know it. We all know it; everyone in the village knows it. We’ll never be free until we’re rid of the white haired man.”

Thijmen and Willem exchanged knowing glances: they both knew what Pieter said was true, but neither of them knew why or how it was true. Indeed, everyone in the village knew it was true, that the crazy old white-haired man in the mansion was somehow keeping them trapped on the island. None of them knew why, and nobody who’d ever been taken by the white haired man had ever come back out of the mansion. Only Nereika was known to have survived, and she had never made any attempt to escape. They knew this to be true because, for every day of the past nine years, someone from the tribe had kept a watch on the mansion, waiting expectantly for Nereika to jump from a balcony or run from a door, and, yet, nothing had ever happened. She always seemed content, somehow.

Pieter stood and stared down at his two friends, made the barest of shrugs and pushed through the shrubbery wall and onto the grass beyond, his arm slipping from the last-instant grasp of Thijmen’s hand. And nothing happened. Pieter stood there on the edge of the lawn, spear in hand, his eyes searching wildly across the expanse of the mansion, expecting the white haired man to suddenly appear, but really expecting to have been turned into a cinder block in an instant of white hot pain. But, there was nothing. Pieter turned and looked back through the shrubs at where he knew his two friends were squatting.

“Get back here, now,” Thijmen whispered hoarsely, “before you press your luck.”

Pieter glanced back up at the mansion, felt a twinge of fear in his stomach, and squeezed back through the shrubs. He smiled, but it wasn’t a smile of confidence or certainty, but, rather, the visage of a man who knows he has somehow cheated death.

“You see, it’s just grass,” Pieter said, the palms of his hands slick with sweat as he grasped his spear. “And that man is just a man, like you or I.”

“Maybe,” Thijmen said, “but now it is time to go.”

Chapter 14

After dinner, Nereika led Arris to Onorien’s study, a large room not unlike his library but which featured a large desk in one corner. Arris realized he had been in it that morning, only the path of hallways to it had changed since then, and the room looked somehow different, now. There were bookshelves and curio tables against the walls, and a pair of leather easy chairs in one corner of the room, flanking a low table with an ornate crystal ashtray. The room was lit by antique wall sconces fitted with globe light bulbs the likes of which Arris had never seen before. Arris had no way of knowing if what he saw meant anything, but he knew odd when he saw it, and he filed that away with the weird lack of electrical switches he’d noticed in the mansion.

The room struck Arris as an anachronism. It was the kind of room men from a certain time in the past would retreat to, away from the women, to discuss politics or finance or sports while drinking aperitifs. It was a men’s clubhouse, a place that Arris imagined existed only in the past, filled with cigar smoke and sexism.

“Your … boss … has an interesting design style,” Arris said to Nereika as he surveyed the room, taking in the heavy curtains and the wrought iron grate covering a large fireplace set into one of the walls.

“How do you mean?” Nereika asked, looking around the room.

Arris shrugged. He wasn’t sure he knew how to describe it. “I dunno. This is all a little old fashioned. Hardcover books on the shelves, leather chairs … it just seems like something a person would’ve done before you could put in a PC and a printer. I mean, it’s well-done and very cool, but it’s, like, a hundred years out of style.”

“He just had this furniture put in last year,” Nereika said, her tone suggesting she didn’t understand what Arris meant.

Arris suppressed a laugh. “No, I don’t mean the furniture looks old, I mean Doctor Onorien’s style is old, or, if you prefer,” Arris fished around for a word to describe it and found none, “a different time period. Vintage, maybe, or classic. Definitely some sort of antique period.”

“Well, I can assure you, Ma- … Doctor Onorien had the room redecorated only last year and he was quite particular about it,” Nereika said, her tone devoid of defensiveness. “He designed the desk himself.”

Arris turned and looked at the desk. It was a large, cumbersome, heavy piece of furniture. Beautiful and ornate, the kind of desk one never saw in modern daily life what with the mass-produced tongue-and-groove pressed wood or metal-and-glass fixtures that adorned most public and private spaces. Arris wondered briefly if such hand-crafted furniture still even existed in corporate CEO offices. He wouldn’t know that, either, since the most elaborate corporate office he’d ever been in was his boss’, and Dale Singer used an undistinguished desk from an era where plainness and uniformity were celebrated as cultural virtues.

Arris shrugged. It meant almost nothing to critique Onorien’s furniture style or, indeed, the peculiar taste that defined the mansion’s interior. Still, Arris wondered aloud, “I hope your Miami home is a bit more with the times. From what I see on HGTV, buyers don’t go much for this sort of 1800s décor.”

Nereika stared at him blankly for a long second, as if what Arris had just said made no sort of sense to her, and then stood abruptly and nodded slightly, acknowledging a non-verbal cue from elsewhere.

“Mr. Arris, can I interest you in a brandy and a cigar?” said Onorien from the corner of the room near the doorway.

Arris turned in his chair. Onorien had a way of making a silent entrance that was beginning to emerge in Arris’ subconscious as a potential problem, an indication that Onorien was accustomed to stealth despite his outward display of hospitality. Arris stood out of the chair and walked over to Onorien as Nereika slipped out of the room.

“Do you have any Scotch?”

“Of course, I’m a civilized man,” Onorien said, reaching toward a selection of crystal decanters on a glass-bottomed silver serving tray. “Single malt or a blend?”

“I’m partial to both, but a single Highland if you’ve got one handy,” Arris said.

Onorien nodded and poured a couple of fingers into a glass. “Ice? Or do you prefer a few drops of Scottish spring water to enhance the bouquet?”

Arris shook his head. “Neat is fine, thank you.”

Onorien set the glass down and pushed it toward Arris before turning and filling a snifter with brandy. Onorien moved a few steps away, opened a cabinet door revealing a humidor and pulled a pair of cigars out, slid one down the shelf toward Arris, and placed an ornate silver lighter and a cutting tool alongside it. The two men spent a minute lighting their cigars. Arris let out a large puff of smoke into the air of the study, realized that he was smoking indoors for the first time in years, and regarded his cigar.

“You know, a guy could get used to living like this.”

Onorien smiled widely, warmly, “A ‘guy’ already has.”

Onorien motioned toward a pair of glass doors and let Arris out through them and onto a masonry veranda that overlooked the jungle canopy and revealed just a squeak of ocean in the distance. The sun was deep into the blue hues of sunset, and out to the east, the first hundreds of stars were already popping through the unfurling indigo veil. The jungle was quiet.

“So, Mr. Arris, what did you do in your life before you began ferrying holiday goers and honeymooners around on island tours?” Onorien asked.

Arris took a sip of his Scotch. “I was in the Army,” he said, taking a small puff from his cigar, briefly wondering how much real biography he should reveal. “I used to fly Rangers to and from the battlefield, mostly, although whatever the mission required, really.”

“You were in Iraq?” Onorien asked.

“Iraq. Afghanistan,” Arris said plainly, “a couple of times in both, actually. And other places over the years.”

Onorien regarded Arris carefully, tipping a small amount of brandy into his mouth and letting it sit on his tongue for a moment. “So, is it true what they say about war, that ‘War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man?’”

Arris was caught off guard by the question and stared blankly into the night sky for a moment. “Somebody thinks that’s what war does to you?”

“It’s just something I heard, once, long ago,” Onorien said. “I’ve always wondered if there were anything redeeming about war for the individual soldier, not ever having been one, myself; if there were any proof that those who ply that trade do so out of some desire to measure themselves against the horrors and cruelties of combat, or if the military calling is just something as simple as a desire in a man to serve his country.”

Arris tapped some ash over the edge of the veranda. There was some truth in that last bit from Onorien, that many of those called to the profession of soldiering wondered if they had what it took to succeed in battle, to not let their fellow comrades in arms down, but Arris had never met anybody who had ever said he actually wanted to test himself. There was, perhaps, a fine line in the distinction between wondering and wanting; Arris had always wondered until he’d found out, and knowing he could do it did not make him want to do it again. He’d never thought about it much more beyond that, as anything other than the job he did and the risk it entailed. And, to be honest, he’d never really thought about the risk to himself; he had always been more concerned in getting the job done, being seen as competent.

“Well, I suppose there’s something to that,” Arris said, “although I’ve never met anyone who wanted to be shot at to find out, what with the chance of being killed and all. But, I suppose everybody wants to know what they’re made of, if they’ve got what it takes to not let their buddies down, to accomplish the mission and come home in one piece.”

Onorien took a few small puffs on his cigar. “So, there’s no thrill to staring danger in the face and coming away alive?”

“Thrill?” Arris asked, sniffing out tiny laugh devoid of mirth. “I think the emotion is ‘fear.’”

The two men were quiet for several long moments as each sipped on his drink, puffed his cigar and listened to the nighttime noises of the jungle below.

“And then you got out of the Army and traded on your skills as pilot to ferry tourists on sightseeing trips around the islands?” Onorien asked.

“Yeah,” Arris said. “I needed a change of pace, a change of scenery, if you will … a new mission. “

“That must be a nice change for you, after your experiences in the Middle East.”

“Yeah, yeah it is,” Arris said, suppressing a shrug. “It’s nice not to get shot at.”

“So, you said earlier today that there would be people looking for you,” Onorien said.

Arris looked at his watch and then up at the sky. “There should be, at least for a little while longer. But after a while they’ll be forced to give up and conclude I sank to the bottom of the sea with my helicopter. I guess they’ll maybe be out there until sunset tomorrow at the latest.

“They’re going to be a bit surprised in a couple of days when your supply ship lets me off on the mainland wherever it lets me off, having already assumed I’ve drowned. Hopefully, they’ll have already had some sort of memorial service for me,” Arris said with a slight smile.

“Do you know what caused your aircraft to crash, Mr. Arris?”

“Oh, yeah, I was on it at the time,” Arris said, trying to sound mirthful. “I didn’t have a lot of time to react, but from what I could tell from the caution lights, I experienced multiple system failures and then the engine quit. Probably something with the fuel delivery system, but I didn’t have much time to diagnose it before I had to autorotate to the water and ditch.

“It’s pretty uncommon for something like that, but given the age of my helicopter, it’s not unheard of,” Arris said, trying to remain vague and banking on Onorien’s ignorance of helicopters. Arris hadn’t expected to be asked to give any details on the nature of his crash landing, although, as he stood there and thought about what he was saying, he should have expected to be asked: how often did anyone crash a helicopter into the ocean and wash ashore on a more-or-less deserted isle?

“Perhaps it was the effects of the Triangle,” Onorien said, taking a deep puff on his cigar and blew a steady stream of white smoke up into the night air.

“What triangle?”

Onorien paused, apparently shocked by the realization that his guest had no idea of what Onorien spoke. He tapped some ash onto the veranda floor and tilted his head ever-so-slightly to the side, as if making sure the universe were screwed on straight. Arris wasn’t sure if he had misspoken or said something so out of the ordinary that any average person would have snickered at him.

“The Devil’s Triangle, Mr. Arris, surely you’ve heard of it?”

This was not what Arris had expected to hear, and he resisted every urge in his subconscious to roll his eyes in disbelief.

“The Devil’s Triangle?”

“Yes, Mr. Arris, The Devil’s Triangle,” Onorien said, lifting his cigar above his head and gesturing in a small circle around the general area. “This part of it is particularly strong, so the lore goes, and there are those who think we are very close to the epicenter of its power. Surely, you must have heard about it.”

Arris was baffled. “Uhh, yeah, sure, I’ve heard of it,” Arris said, trying to figure out what tack to take, uncertain of Onorien’s interest, “but just what I’ve seen on television shows about it. Mysterious boat disappearances, ships that enter with crews and are later found unmanned, something about a bunch of World War Two bombers that disappeared on a routine training flight. Why?”

“Yes, exactly,” Onorien said, his shoulders easing up a bit in relief. “Where do these people go? What happens to them? Why is it in this particular part of the world where so many strange things occur to those who try to pass through it? Maybe whatever happened to them caused your helicopter to malfunction.”

For a moment, Arris could see the missile ripping through the sky toward his aircraft, the white smoke billowing behind it. He remembered jerking the controls to try and make it miss. He took a sip of his drink.

“Well, I … I have to say that I hadn’t thought of that particular possibility. I didn’t realize I was in The Devil’s Triangle, to tell you the truth,” Arris said, his mind racing to fill in unforeseen details of his cover story. Cover story? His role in the mission was un-credited, not warranting “Pilot” in the final scroll up the screen. “I’m surprised nobody has ever mentioned it to me before, what with all the flights I’ve made since starting the business.”

“Yes, it makes you wonder,” Onorien said, pausing and staring intently at Arris for a short moment. “You have to wonder where all those other people went, no? So many of them, so many stories over so many years; why did none of them ever come out to tell a tale?”

“I’d wager they’re down on the bottom of the ocean with my helicopter,” Arris said.

“Maybe,” Onorien smiled. “Or, perhaps, they made their way to some small little island like this one, like the natives who live here now, generations of slaves and slave traders mingling their blood lines and creating a new hybrid of human.

“Why didn’t they ever leave? Why was nothing of them ever discovered? Perhaps the power of the Triangle keeps them here, hiding them and the means that brought them here.”

This was a conversation for which Arris was singularly unprepared to have, and he took a moment to stare out into the now completely dark sky, the sun having finished setting.

“Why would it let everybody else pass through but target them?” Arris asked. “It’s not like the Caribbean isn’t a high draw tourist destination; there are plenty of people to target. I’ve been flying around here for a while and never had a problem. Until yesterday, that is.”

“My point, exactly, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “How does it work? Why does it choose some and not others, or, why does it choose all? Ever since Europeans began sailing these waters centuries ago, tales of weird and strange occurrences have been told, but nobody knows why or how.”

Arris did his best not to stare in disbelief. “Okay, I’ll bite, how?”

Onorien shrugged. “That’s why I come here: to study it, to explore its ways, to determine the nature of its ways, to understand its magic. There are strange and mystical places all over the world, each of them with their own powers, each of which only works in certain ways under certain conditions, and I spend my time working to understand them.”

Arris took a sip of his drink, finished it and set the glass down on the veranda’s railing. “So, you’re some sort of paranormal investigator? I’ve actually seen some show on television where a bunch of plumbers hang out at night in abandoned buildings with electronic equipment and claim to be searching for ghosts. I can’t say as I’ve ever watched much more than a few seconds between clicks on the remote, though.”

Onorien guffawed. “In a manner of speaking, I guess I am like them,” Onorien said, taking a puff on his cigar and letting the smoke out in a big cloud. “Only, I don’t look for ghosts, Mr. Arris, I look for things nobody believes in because nobody has thought to believe in them, despite the evidence to the contrary. Ghosts are not so spectacular a thing to believe in; man has believed in them ever since the first human watched another human die and wondered where the person in the body went. Humans have always believed that the spirit persisted after the body perished, so it’s not that unusual to find people looking for ways to contact the spirit world.

“But that’s not what I mean, at least, not entirely. I’m interested in what you would call the paranormal or the supernatural, The Divine World.”

“The divine?” Arris said. “You mean like religious?”

Onorien paused for a moment and thought about this question, pursing his lips and rolling his cigar between his thumb and forefingers. “Almost … but, no. Although, to be sure, there is an element of faith involved. Since the era of man began, man has always believed in, or, at least, professed a disbelief in, certain kinds of things. We no longer believe in magic or monsters or demons or devils but, long ago, mankind did. At one point in our collective past, not believing in these things would’ve made you a pariah, an outcast, a heretic, perhaps. These were the things that were true regardless of anybody’s ability to prove they were true.

“Did you know, Mr. Arris that at one time nearly every civilization on the planet believed in the existence of dragons? Every advanced civilization with any ability to record its history made some sort reference of enormous scaled beasts that flew and breathed fire. The dragons vary from culture to culture, but they persist through them and all of our ancestor civilizations believed these creatures existed without having ever seen a single dinosaur bone.

“Now, we have enormous collections of dinosaur bones revealing some of the most awesome and dangerous creatures ever to have walked the planet and nobody believes in dragons anymore. They are now myth. How does such a belief change?”

“I don’t know, maybe because nobody has ever seen a dragon?” Arris said.

Onorien smiled slightly. “Nobody sees the gods they worship and almost everybody on the planet believes in a god. Indeed, many religions actively proselytize to gain adherents but can show no evidence of the god they worship or the benefits of believing.

“You don’t need to spend much time at all looking for evidence of the divine to find it, to find the stories that show most people once believed in the divine nature of life. It’s a paradox of a sort: there are many things nobody believes in anymore that everybody believed in long ago, and, now, there are many things to believe in that nobody once believed in, and, almost always, the two streams are incompatible. You have to ask yourself, Mr. Arris, why would almost all of humanity believe in the supernatural – the divine – for most of human history and then suddenly cast it aside? What changed in the past that would cause such a wholesale departure from one stream on consciousness to another?

“It’s almost as if the world underwent a simultaneous religious transformation, exchanging one faith for another and not getting anything tangible in return for the switch.”

For a moment, Arris could almost taste the beer he and his roommates would have been drinking during a late-night bull-session in college, the half-thought-out mystical interpretations and religious implications of the world mingling with what he and his friends experienced as part of the process of meshing with the real world of adult life. They had never figured out what made the world go around then. At some point, the real world intruded on the theoretical and made such explorations moot. Such subjects now bored Arris.

“Well, as I understand it, magic was how early humans interpreted the world, how they made sense of everything around them that they didn’t have the science to understand. Early man was too busy just surviving to spend any time investigating why lighting struck or the sun rose, so they came up with something, anything, to make some sense of their environment,” Arris said. “I’m sure it made sense to them on some level, gave some sort of predictability to their physical environments. I guess, otherwise, they’d have come up with something else, religion, maybe.

“Religion is a more metaphysical reaction to the world, a ‘what does it all mean’ attempt at interpretation. Since nobody can know, religion filled the void. It still does. There’s been a lot of philosophical debate over it ever since, as far as I can tell, and there’s no general agreement on which religion is the right one.”

Onorien listened patiently and drummed his fingers on the veranda. He absently set down his cigar alongside his near-empty glass, brought his hands together in the prayer position, and collapsed his fingers into a steeple, pointing his two fingers at Arris. “And you? Are you a man of faith?”

“In religion? No,” Arris said, turning away from Onorien and staring out over the jungle, and, then, softly, almost under his breath, he added, “I lost my faith a while ago.”

Onorien tilted his head slightly, trying to catch the last bit of what Arris had just said, and was just about to ask him to re-state what he had said under his breath when Nereika stepped through the doorway and swept her eyes over the two of them. A look of uncertainty washed over her face before she composed herself, her hands clasped in front of her. Onorien stepped toward her, avoiding contact with Arris, who watched the scene curiously.

“Yes, Nereika?” Onorien asked.

Nereika made a slight head nod toward the jungle. Arris checked the tree line on the far side of the manicured lawn but could make nothing out in the darkness. Onorien turned to the jungle, made a small motion with his hands, and nodded.

“Mr. Arris, I apologize, but I must leave you to your own devices for the rest of the night,” Onorien said, no evidence of any trouble showing in his demeanor. “Please, help yourself to the bar in my study. I look forward to continuing our discussion tomorrow, after dinner.”

Nereika and Onorien slipped through the open door and disappeared into the mansion. Arris turned back to the jungle and peered into the darkness, certain that there had to have been something out there to draw Onorien away, but saw nothing and heard only the sounds of nature. Arris stood still for a moment, the nature of the conversation turning through his head, its direction not pointless, but intended to arrive at Onorien’s last question: was he a man of faith? Faith in what? What had Onorien been trying to discover about him?

Chapter 15

Gregoire pulled the throttle back on the boat, cutting the engine to idle. The boat slowed to a stop and bobbed on the undulating ocean, but Gregoire’s attention was focused on the compass in front of him. It spun wildly, not fixing on north or any other point for longer than an instant, before twisting around again. He tapped it with his finger.

“Now, that’s just not right.”

He looked around at the world to make sure the boat wasn’t spinning and closed his eyes for a moment to use his kinesthetic senses to feel for a sense of turning. Aside from the gentle rocking of the boat, the world was motionless. Yet, the compass still spun.

Gregoire picked up the map and shined his flashlight on it, the red light playing over the map. He looked around the ocean again, spotted a small smudge of a shadow on the horizon, and looked back at the map. He reoriented it and stared up into the night sky, locating Ursa Major and picking out the Big Dipper. He traced a line from it to the Little Dipper and located the North Star at the tip of its handle. He twisted the map a little more, orienting it with the night sky’s position, and then stared back out at the ocean.

“At least my eyes are working,” he said, marking his spot on the map with a pencil, “but what the hell am I doing back here, again?”

He set the map down and pushed the throttle forward, turned the boat toward the shadow on the horizon and made his way to it. A short while later he saw the lights of the island’s make-shift harbor, a network of white lights hanging over a small collection of wooden docks. He puttered the boat up to one of the docks and threw his line onto it, cutting the engine and jumping out of the boat to secure it to a cleat.

“Hello, sir, can I help you?” said the voice from a silhouette making its way down the dock.

The shape emerged into a cone of light from an overhead lamp and Gregoire recognized the man as the dockworker from earlier in the day. Gregoire smiled.

“You keep long hours.”

The worker shrugged. “It’s a living, sir. And you, what brings you back to our island so late at night? The weather is beautiful.”

Gregoire motioned toward his boat. “I’m having some sort of technical problems with my navigation system. I ended up here by mistake; I was trying to get somewhere else.”

The worker approached the boat and looked down into at the cockpit. He smiled.

“Compass problem?”

Gregoire nodded. “I was out there and it was just … turning on its axis. Damndest thing.”

“It happens more often than you think,” the worker said. “Usually the American Coast Guard has to come and rescue lost boaters, although a few of them make it here.”

“I know the dock is for guests, so I’d like to be a guest for the night, if that’s possible,” Gregoire said, fishing out his government credit card. “And, I’m going to need to refuel before morning.”

The worker checked his watch. “It’s after ten, sir.”

“I can sleep on the boat, if that’s alright.”

The worker looked around the docks and relaxed. “No, I mean, sorry, my shift is done,” the man said. “Please, if you want, you can stay with me, there’s no need for you to check in with the resort. I was going to crack open a bottle of rum and play the Yankees’ game from this afternoon, if you’d like to join me.”

“Rum? I’m game,” Gregoire said, introducing himself with a handshake.

“I’m Dierks,” the dockworker said, returning the shake.

Gregoire let out a small laugh. “Dierks, huh?”

“Family name. I’m Dutch on my great-great grandfather’s side, come,” Dierks said, turning and motioning for Gregoire to follow.

Dierks’ home was a small bungalow just inside the tree line, the interior a disheveled bachelor’s pad. Dierks pulled two small glass juice cups from a shelf in the kitchenette, set them on a round kitchen table with a Formica top and stainless steel tubular legs, and poured each half-full with rum. He handed one to Gregoire.

“Sorry,” Dierks said abruptly, “do you need cola or some other mixer?”

Gregoire shook his head. “I’m on an island, right, so let’s drink to the island life.”

The two men inclined their glasses and tipped rum into their mouths. Gregoire looked around the room and noticed the collection of Yankees paraphernalia on a bookshelf in a corner of the room.

“Yankees, fan, eh?”

Dierks nodded. “Lifelong. I’ve got the game on my TiVo, so we don’t have to watch the commercials.”

“Nice,” Gregoire said. “But, I was wondering, you said earlier that compass problems aren’t all that unusual out here. What’s up with that?”

Dierks eyed Gregoire curiously for a second, took another sip of his rum, and made a small face of embarrassment. “Who knows? The weirdoes would have you believe it’s the effects of The Bermuda Triangle.”

Gregoire raised his eyebrows. “The Bermuda Triangle?”

Dierks nodded.

“What do you think it would be?”

Dierks shook his head. “No idea. But every so often, somebody gets lost out there on the ocean, gets confused about their position and radios for help. You’ll listen to them tell the US Coast Guard that their compass isn’t working or their GPS is on the fritz. Sometimes, somebody will make their way here and tell us the same thing; only they weren’t able to contact anybody on their radio, either.”

Dierks finished off his last slug of rum and walked to the kitchen table for a refill. “And, every once in a while you’ll hear a story, always third- or fourth-hand, about some ship that was found adrift, empty, sometimes with what appears to be evidence of a violent struggle. Although, I’ve never seen such a thing nor met anyone who has, it’s always the friend of a friend who knows somebody who saw such a thing, so I don’t really know what to make of such stories.”

“Weird,” Gregoire said, and poured a small measure of rum into his glass. “And there are those who think it might be the effects of the Bermuda Triangle? I thought that was, I dunno, a myth or something.”

“It’s at least that, but down here among the islands, there are no shortages of folks who believe in strange, mystical things,” Dierks said. “Around here, it’s the Bermuda Triangle; elsewhere, Voodoo.” Dierks lifted his glass up and gently shook it. He made a slight shrug and half-rolled his eyes at the description of his fellow island natives, “Too much of this and people, island people, will believe anything they hear.”

Chapter 16

Gregoire awoke to a clock radio set to static turned to a high volume, a noise that had instantly irritated Gregoire to full alertness, and Dierks popped out of his little bedroom moments later in same clothes he had been wearing the day before, which Gregoire took to be some sort of resort uniform. After a breakfast of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts and instant coffee, Gregoire made his way down to the boat with Dierks.

“So, you work for the US government?” Dierks said after fueling the boat and running the credit card.

“Contractor, technically, why?”

Dierks dipped his head toward the boat, “Military?”

“The boat? Sorta,” Gregoire said. “I’m on a Customs Department contract but I’m not at liberty to say about what.”

“They could’ve given you a bigger boat. This is kind of small to be out on the high seas.”

“It’s a twenty-one footer, it’ll get the job done,” Gregoire said. “I’m just island hopping, not crossing the ocean.”

“Well, good-luck with that. I hope you find your way to the next island,” Dierks said, pointing out to the east. “It’s that way about 30-35 minutes at full power.”

“Thanks, Dierks,” Gregoire said, stepping down into the boat and catching the line Dierks tossed to him. “And if I don’t see you again, it just means I got where I was going.”

Gregoire pointed the boat out into the open sea and opened the throttle, the wind pouring across his face. He took in a deep breath of the sea air, checked his position relative to the rising sun, and then looked down at the compass. Nothing. It sat in its gimbals, aligned slightly east-northeast, just as it was designed to do.

Chapter 17

Arris awoke just after dawn, the sounds of jungle birds washing into the room, reminding him before he had to open his eyes that the previous day had not been a hallucination. Or, if it had been, it was a persistent one. If that were the case, he didn’t mind; people who hallucinated under extreme survival conditions at sea often saw things that ultimately drowned them, and if his brain was telling him to take it easy and go with the flow, well, he was going to float in the ocean and enjoy the Fantasy Island construct his subconscious was spinning out of salt water and sunstroke.

Fantasy Island? How had that decades-old television show popped into his head? He must be afloat in the middle of nowhere if his stream-of-consciousness was going to pluck memories of a television show from his childhood. At least, he thought, he wasn’t on The Love Boat, although Gilligan’s Island wouldn’t have been a bad hallucinatory option: he’d always had a thing for Mary Ann before he ever knew what it meant to have a thing for a girl.

He opened his eyes and looked around the room. It was the same, only now there was a tray of fresh fruit, soft bread and a small container of coffee sitting on a low table across the room, near the door. That startled him back into reality. Arris was a light sleeper, conditioned to it through years of military training and the need to be able to rouse himself instantly at the slightest suspicious noise. He reached under his pillow, felt his pistol and relaxed. He left it there and walked around the room, checking it for any other differences from the night before and saw that everything was as it had been.

He grabbed a couple of strawberries from a bowl and pushed through the door out onto the balcony off his room, surveying the jungle canopy and the sunrise easing its way above it. Another day in paradise was unspooling from the east, and Arris was suddenly glad to be away from the daily rigors of his day job, of his life’s routine back at home. If only this were a vacation and not some cushy variant of search and rescue training, he thought, and he could get used to this. But now that the seed had been planted in his mind, he couldn’t shake the idea that, somehow, the Devil’s Triangle was behind everything, despite the clear memories of an anti-aircraft missile burrowing its way through the sky at his helicopter just a few days earlier, a reality much more sharply focused in his mind than the anachronistic mansion built into the side of a low mountain wall on a deserted island in the middle of the Caribbean. And he could see the mansion, feel it with the palm of his hand as he chewed on a strawberry.

Another thing to consider was what was meant by the delivery of the food to his room, under stealth or not. Was he not going to see his hosts for the day, or was it an implication that he should remain in his room until requested elsewhere? There was no way of really knowing, and after he had finished the coffee and food, he knew he couldn’t spend the day sitting on the balcony, staring at trees. Not when there was a beach a half-mile away on the other side of the jungle.

He spent the morning wandering the mansion, amazed at its interior size, almost certain it was bigger on the inside than the outside, as if it were dug into the mountain. The floor his room was on was lined with guest rooms on either side of the corridor, and he poked his head into several of them. None of the doors he tried were locked, and all of the rooms were appointed similarly, though in different color schemes. It wasn’t until the third room that he realized they all had exterior windows and doors. He poked his head back through the doorway and examined the hallway, noted the position of his room’s door on the opposite side, and oriented himself to where he knew the nearby beach lay.

Back inside the room, however, it was as if the entire world had flip-flopped. He walked across the floor and pushed open the door to the balcony and looked out onto a jungle canopy like the one from his room. He gazed at the exterior of the mansion from the balcony and recognized the architecture of the mansion, the similarity of it to the view from his room, but it was off, somehow, as if it were skewed by a few degrees, or reflected backward as if seen in a mirror. It wasn’t the same view; it was just similar enough to give the verisimilitude of being a new view while being just different enough to make a casual observer not notice the similarities. For the life of him, Arris couldn’t make out the differences, exactly, but something inside him, something deep in his years of pilot training told him his seat-of-the-pants sensations were right, that he should be looking inside the mountain, not at a new beach on the opposite side of the island.

“Trust your instruments,” Arris said under his breath, touching the railing to give himself some sort of indication of his attitude vis-à-vis the horizon in the distance.

He crossed the hallway and passed through the room opposite, opening the balcony door and stepping out onto it. He turned and craned his neck, trying to look up and over the building to where he knew the mountain must be, but the façade of the mansion obscured any direct observation. Still, it had to be there.

Arris made his way downstairs, pausing at the various curio tables set in the long hallway to the stairs to look at the Objects de’Art that sat on them, or the paintings in ornate gilt frames mounted on the walls above. He was almost certain he recognized some of them from the art class he had taken as an undergrad almost twenty years earlier, but he couldn’t place a name or artist to any of them. They were almost famous works to the casual observer, and he was certain art aficionados would know what they were. Arris had learned almost nothing useful about Onorien or his companion, Nereika, in the short time he’d interacted with them, but he was quickly coming to a determination that Onorien, at least, was an old soul, a man living in an age long gone and uninterested in modernity beyond whatever creature comforts it allowed to make life easier.

Which, to Arris’ mind, was the whole point of modern life: it was easier to live. Why else had the dishwasher or microwave been invented than as a means of shaving hardship and wasted time from the rigors of daily life, allowing the opportunity to enjoy living? Not that life in the mansion appeared to be absent any of the conveniences of modern life, they were all just hidden from the eye, so far as Arris could tell. How else to explain the lights?

At the top of the curving banister to the main floor below, he studied the observatory foyer from above, taking in the oval-shaped entry room to the mansion and studying the large, heavy wooden door that barred the outside world. He walked down the stairs and ran his fingers across the wood of the door, tapping it to get a sense of its density, its purpose. Solid.

Indeed, so far as he could tell, the entire mansion could be described with such a word. The building was made of large masonry blocks - granite or sandstone, maybe, Arris didn’t know – with an intricate frieze along the top row of stones where wall met roof. What was carved into the stones was also beyond Arris’ ken as he had no way of getting close to them nor did he have a pair of binoculars through which to look. Not that he cared, though, it was just a detail he had caught the day earlier on his walk back across the lawn with Nereika after their encounter with the natives.

Inside, the floors of the hallways were polished stone covered with Oriental runner carpets, narrow, intricate stretches of heavy woven cloth in deep reds, blues and yellows. The windows sported matching draperies and, everywhere, there were small, waist-high wooden tables displaying vases, decorative boxes and other types of collectible junk – small figurines carved from volcanic rock, a Masai tribe stick and a family of elephants whittled from African hardwood, a small collection of chess pieces in cut from various types of stone - Arris had often found in the houses of other couples, items inevitably put on display by the woman of the house as a means of showcasing the couples’ interests or tastes.

His wife had had a fascination with pine cones which he had never understood, would never understand, and now lived with out of fidelity to the past. They had meant something to her, but he had never bothered to find out what when she was alive; it had seemed unimportant to him at the time, to know what she saw in them. Now, he wished he knew, wished they had some connection to a memory that could remind him of some specific detail about her personality.

The rooms he poked into on the first floor consisted of dining rooms, drawing rooms, sitting rooms and, somewhere around one of the corners and up a small draw of stairs, the hallway with Onorien’s study and library. Oddly, he couldn’t remember exactly how he had gotten to any of those rooms the day before. He paused in the hallway and looked around, trying to get his bearings. Had it been left or right to the breakfast dining room?

He shook his head slightly and squinted. He had had two more full-sized glasses of Scotch last night after Onorien had departed with Nereika, finishing off the cigar and relaxing to the jungle sounds, but certainly not enough to have made him groggy and forgetful this morning. Not enough by half, and more. He had been recovering from a long day of dehydration and intense sun floating on the ocean, but even yesterday he had noticed that he felt fine despite it. He should’ve required another day’s bed rest and liquids, but he’d been up and about as if nothing had happened. Maybe he’d slept longer than he knew?

Maybe it was the effects of The Bermuda Triangle?

Arris smiled to himself at the thought, the previous night’s conversation filtering into his consciousness as he wandered the halls of the mansion, trying to orient himself to his memories of the layout. He turned another corner and walked through a pair of open doors into a large ballroom, something that reminded him of a room he’d seen in various period dramas of the Victorian era in England, movies based on novels by Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters. “Chick lit rom-coms,” his wife had called them.

Arris had never understood the formality of the courting process suggested in those movies, and he certainly had never bothered to read the novels, not if the films were anything close to true representations of the stories. The age of such strict, structured interpersonal communications rules sets was long gone, and Arris had always wondered what purpose it had served while watching the characters interact.

And in a room like this one, the courting process required they dance. Everyone knew all the dances, and the intrigue was always on how one character or another would set up the partner-switching rhythm to end up with their intended love interest. Why you couldn’t just up and ask a woman if she wanted to dance had always been a small mystery to him, one that he had never cared to even ask his wife about, and she’d have been one who would have known.

Arris stared up at its high ceiling, appreciated the intricate crown molding and highly polished hardwood floor. He wondered if the room ever saw any use, if it had ever seen any use: there were no neighbors and Arris had no way of knowing if Onorien even knew enough people with boats to invite. But, then, Onorien had said the mansion had been built by his ancestors, so who knew what life had been like on the island fifty or a hundred years earlier?

He walked across the width of the room to a pair of tall glass-paned doors, twisted the brass fixtures and pushed them with ease, opening them onto a large outdoor area. The mid-morning sun lit the patio perfectly, and Arris blotted out the sun with his thumb and made a rough guess that the large square of stonework would stay shadow-free until sunset and then, on nights when local astronomical conditions allowed, would be bathed in perfect moonlight. He guessed that was on purpose, a detail to negate the need for too much artificial lighting. He wasn’t sure if that was clever, good architectural design or luck.

And then Arris noticed the lack of sound. It was a sensation that took several minutes to realize. When he did, Arris listened more intently, trying to figure out if it was the silence of prey going to ground to avoid detection. It was a preternatural stillness Arris always equated with ambushes, a vacancy of noise filled suddenly with gunfire, a phony sense of calm, as if the entire world were in on some joke about to unfold on him. But one could never tell that beforehand. It was always afterward, when the smell of smoke drifted on the wind and the bodies were being counted that Arris would realize that just moments before the action started, there had been an unnatural stillness. Arris looked around for the point of attack: nothing.

Maybe it was just the design of the patio area, an architectural detail to suppress ambient noise to enhance outdoor musical performances? He turned and suppressed a start at the sight of a light-skinned black man wearing khaki linen slacks and a light blue button-down shirt standing on the patio, just this side of the threshold. The man was in his late teens or early twenties, lean, with a pair of light blue eyes that sparkled in the late morning sun. He stood still, relaxed, his arms at his sides. Arris smiled at the man to no effect.

“Will you be requiring anything this morning, sir?” the man asked, his English thick with a Dutch-African accent similar to the Nereika’s, only much more pronounced.

“I don’t think so,” Arris said as he walked closer to the man, trying to get a sense of what he did for Onorien. “Is Doctor Onorien going to be around this afternoon?”

The man shook his head. “No, sir, he and Nereika will be otherwise engaged until dinner.”

Arris looked around the patio for a second, made a gesture with his arms, and asked, “I don’t suppose you have a plastic tub somewhere around here with a selection of bathing suits for guests, do you?”

The man considered the question for a moment, and Arris could tell from the man’s blank look he had no idea what Arris was asking. “No, sir, I don’t think that we do.”

“Great,” Arris said flatly, “another day with a thriller.”

Chapter 18

Gregoire turned the boat from yet another small, private island and throttled the engine up. The island was the vacation home of a rock and roll musician of whom he’d never heard, much to the incredulity of the guests staying on it, who had done much to assure him that everything on their private island was fine. They’d regarded him as law enforcement at first, wary of his sudden knocks on the side gate to the outdoor pool, and several of the men had taken to wandering to other areas of the pool compound to get views on other areas of the island beyond the pool enclosure’s walls. Gregoire had smiled; they were all coked up, he figured, and suddenly paranoid that their island get-away had finally come under notice of the law.

Gregoire had quickly defused the situation, informing the group of models and fashion photographers that he was looking for a friend who’d gotten lost on a small boat and might have taken refuge there. When it was clear to them he wasn’t there as the point guard to an oncoming drug raid, they invited him to look around, assuring him they’d seen nobody during the week they’d been on the island, and Gregoire felt no need to poke through their business. Indeed, if Arris had washed ashore here, he’d have found a way to be sitting poolside with the group, taking an impromptu vacation from the world of specialty private military contractors.

Back on the boat, Gregoire sat down on the bench in the cockpit and oriented himself to the ocean, making sure the compass remained true, and slowed the engine to an idle. The boat bobbed on the water. Gregoire picked up the binoculars and scanned the horizon, looking for a man in a yellow inflatable life vest. Nothing. There were only a few more small islands left on his map before the vast expanse of sea, and if Arris hadn’t made it to any of them, he was likely lost to the waves and Davy Jones’ Locker below.

Chapter 19

Thijmen and Pieter paddled their make-shift fishing boat back to the shore, Pieter hopping out in the surf, pulling it onto the sand and tying it off to a stake. The morning’s catch had been typical: meager, but enough for the day’s dinner. Maybe one of the other boats had had better luck, but none were in, yet.

He and Pieter had been quiet since the night before, neither broaching the subject of the conversation outside the mansion grounds. If they hadn’t been daily fishing companions, each aware of the other’s habits, the day’s fishing would’ve resulted in petty arguing over what lines to cast or where to fish. Instead, the two had been quiet, listening only to the lapping of waves against the boat and the occasional call of an ocean bird above. Not that that was unusual; the two often fished in silence for long periods of time, each staring out over the water at the horizon, wondering what was beyond, if anything was beyond.

There were stories handed down from the company’s elders, passed down from captain to captain, from first mate to deck hands, of the lands from which their forbears had come. Tales of a country of white skinned men like the white-haired man, where there were four seasons to mark the passing of the year and an endless stretch of land in every direction to the horizon. They in the company all knew about the solstices, the ways to mark the passing of the seasons, but of the seasons themselves; nobody had ever experienced what it meant for the weather to change. Even the yearly storms always left behind the same weather.

And then there were the stories passed down about the lands of their dark-skinned ancestors, where strange animals prowled thick jungles and the tribesmen went on hunts. The lands there extended infinitely, and no ancestor had ever been to the end of the earth; the weather was constant, beautiful. There had been the battle over hunting grounds and river access, the capture of the ancestors by the enemy and the arrival of the white men in boats. The stories of long days and nights in the darkness of the bottom of the boat always ended with the storm, the ship being tossed about as the ancestors screamed inside the ship in terror.

And then there was the beach. The storm had spared many lives, leaving a collection of white and black ancestors sopping wet on the sand, a blue sky and rising sun mocking the perils of the night before. For a few weeks, the Dutch ancestors had made trips to the wreckage of the main ship, bringing back supplies or dismantling bits of it for use on shore. But another storm eventually came and swept what was left of the ship away, stranding the Dutch and African ancestors on the island together.

Nobody knew what to make of the stories from the past. Not Thijmen, whose title in the company was boson’s mate and whose father had been First Mate under Captain Mbunde Thorvald on the Eighth Failure. Each generation had tried to make it over the horizon, back to the lands from which the lore told them they had come. Each had failed. And each generation blamed the failure, somehow, on the white-haired man in the mansion.

Thijmen leaned against the bow of the boat and stared at the tree line on the other side of the sand, beyond which lay the wood and thatch structures in which they lived. Their plaats. The women and girls would be getting the dinner preparations started, waiting for the day’s catch to come in off the boats, while the boys would be on their way soon to help with the nets and the repair of the fishing tackle, as required. Thijmen shook his head for a moment, recalling a half-remembered bit of a story about how the homeland, in Nederlands, had large stone buildings like the white-haired man’s mansion and collections of people so large it was impossible to know everyone or, even, to know the layout of the entire area. A werelstad was the Dutch term; there was no similar word in African. Thijmen had no way of imagining it, no more so than had any of his ancestors in describing what snow was.

Thijmen only knew that there was much more to know of the world than he knew of it, much more than the island and the surrounding sea. And he was sure the white-haired man was somehow responsible.

“Did you feel it out there?” Pieter asked.

Thijmen looked up, returning his focus to the real world. “Yeah.”

“Weird how it gets like that,” Pieter said. “It’s almost as if the island knows.”

Thijmen looked at the sand, then the trees, and nodded. “Maybe it’s the water.”

Pieter shrugged and smiled. “Maybe God wants to keep us here; maybe this is Eden and this time, God won’t let us fall from grace.”

Thijmen laughed. It was the oldest argument among them, for those that still believed in the Dutch religion, for those that could still remember much of it: man had failed God once before; this time, God would not fail man, but keep him in paradise.

“I’d give anything to know what an apple tasted like,” Thijmen said, “to know that one existed, even.”

Just then, Sofia slipped from the tree line and stopped on the edge of the sand, her face awash with a mixture of hope, fear and uncertainty. It was a face he had seen before, upon discovery she was pregnant with their first child, only it was different this time. There was more uncertainty and fear.

“What?” Thijmen asked.

“Larumba saw Dedrick this morning.”

Thijmen turned his head quickly to Pieter. Larumba was a rigger’s mate, barely a teenager, and one of the boys tasked with observing the mansion during the day.

“He saw Dedrick?” Pieter said, closing the distance with Sofia, his voice urgent, anxious. “Where?”

“In the back of the mansion where the white-haired man has his gatherings,” Sofia said.

“In the Dead Calm?” Pieter asked, glancing at Thijmen.

“Yes,” Sofia said.

They called it the Dead Calm because nobody had ever heard anything come from it, no matter how many people they watched in it. The white-haired man held gatherings in it on the summer and winter solstices, affairs in which dozens of others would chant and dance in complete silence, their mouths making no sounds, their movements upon the stone surfaces silent. It was almost like being at sea, just out of sight of the island, where the surface of the ocean was still and no wind stirred. The doldrums, some of their ancestors had called it, a place from which no one could escape.

“What was he doing? Was he with the white-haired man or Nereika?” Thijmen asked.

Sofia shook her head. “He was with the man from the beach.”

“The man from the beach,” Pieter said, his right hand unconsciously moving to the knife he had taken from the man’s clothing. “Doing what?”

“Watching him, Larumba said,” Sofia said. “The new man was out in the Dead Calm late this morning, just standing on it and looking around. Larumba said the man seemed to be examining it for something, and then Dedrick came through the doors and just stood there, watching the man.”

“Just watched him?” Thijmen asked.

Sofia nodded.

“And?” Pieter asked.

Sofia shrugged. “Then the man turned, saw Dedrick, said something to him and went into the mansion.”

“That’s it?” Pieter said.

“That’s good news, Pieter,” Thijmen said, “because at least we know he’s still alive.”

“Where’s Larumba, now?” Pieter asked.

A minute later the three were in the center of the plaats, the rest of the ship’s crew waiting, except for the two boats still on the water, their crews fishing. Captain Aald sat on the captain’s chair, nearest the fire, and watched them as they approached. All eyes were on Thijmen and Pieter, the leaders of the crew’s two boarding parties. Anticipation crackled through the silence of the men and women; the children hovered in the back, in the shadows of the trees, observing.

From behind the captain’s chair, First Mate Mirenga placed his hand on Larumba and walked the teenager forward, in front of the gathering. Mirenga gave the boy a couple of pats on the shoulder for encouragement, then stepped back into the gathering.

“Did he look alright?” Pieter asked, his words a rush.

Larumba nodded.

“How did he look?” Thijmen asked.

Larumba scuffed the ground with his toe. “He looked normal, I guess. He was just standing there, staring at the man from the beach.”

“That’s all?”

“He was wearing different clothes. New clothes. Brown pants and a blue shirt,” Larumba said.

Pieter and Thijmen exchanged looks.

Captain Aald stood and took a step forward. “Yes, just like we’ve seen Nereika wearing. It doesn’t mean anything we can know.”

“Perhaps the white-haired man intends to keep Dedrick as he’s kept Nereika these past few years,” Pieter said, scanning the rest of the crew. “Can we let this devil of a man do this to us again whenever he wants? To just take us at will, never to be heard from again? How many of us must disappear into that mansion before we strike at it?

“I say we take to arms, now, and strike while we know Dedrick is still alive, while there’s still a chance of freeing him, of maybe even freeing Nereika, finally, from the clutches of this man.”

There was complete silence for a moment. Everybody agreed but nobody would assent. Everyone knew the history. Aald raised his palm.

“You speak good counsel, Pieter, but hasty counsel,” Aald said. “I trust I do not need to remind anybody of General Order Number One?”

Aald surveyed the group for a moment. “Should we really risk what we have, now, to save Dedrick and Nereika? We have built up a good life here, improved upon our situation and made life more comfortable, do we really want to risk our lives to help two of our members who, and we all know this is true, were taken before they were ever made full members of the crew? This is not to say that we do not have affection for them or wish them back, but Nereika has been gone a while now, her parents have passed on, and there is no one to speak for her among us. And Dedrick’s parents know he is still several years from full-membership in the crew, and as such has no stake.

”We have never been successful against the men who have lived in that building. Many of us have died over the years trying, and remember: the last time such a thing was tried, all but one member of the raiding parties were lost, and the one that did return was never the same man as went out, so altered was his mind he swam out to sea and drowned himself to rid himself of whatever curse the white-haired man put upon him.”

“That raid was more than four generations ago, Captain,” Pieter said. “And since then how many have we lost? How many have been taken from the jungle or the beaches, never to be seen or heard from again? Who of us will be next? Is it better to live here on this island, trapped here in the plaats, surviving on fishing and foraging, none of us to ever return to the lands of our mothers and fathers?”

“We all hear you, Pieter, and I do not doubt that all of us wish the same as you, to go back to the lands from which our ancestors came, to see the sights and wonders of the world that have been handed down to us in stories,” Aald said. “But every generation has tried, and every generation has failed. Some have never come back from the water’s edge, where the seas grow calm. But none have ever come back who have trod upon the lawn of that mansion, not those who were taken nor those who wandered upon it by accident.”

“This is true, so the lore tells us, but last night Pieter threw a rock on the grass and nothing happened,” Willem said, pushing through the back of the gathering, late to the gathering but having heard enough.

“A rock is not a man,” Aald said, turning to Willem.

Willem stared at Pieter a moment. “He also stood upon the grass and was not destroyed.”

There was a sudden silence among the group, and all eyes turned to Pieter. He turned his head through the members of the crew, returning their gazes.

“You did this?” Aald asked.

Pieter nodded. “It is why I say we should go today, now. Perhaps the arrival of this stranger has unsettled things. We watched him yesterday go down to the beach with Nereika in the morning. Later, he walked the mansion grounds freely and nothing happened to him.”

Aald turned to Larumba. “And what of today? Did you see this man after he was on the Dead Calm?”

Larumba nodded. “He strolled the grounds a bit, took the path from the mansion to the beach again and stared out at the sea for a while before returning to the mansion. Nothing happened to him.”

First Mate Mirenga stepped forward. “Perhaps he is with the white-haired man, a visitor like we have seen before.”

Thijmen shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. This man washed ashore on the beach at night. The others we have seen have never been watched arriving; they simply are there when they are, then they are gone.

“I think Pieter may be on to something. Perhaps this new man is different.”

Chapter 20

Captain Stanley “Pike” Chelingham sat on a chair in the gloom of the Killjoy’s first deck, oblivious to the sweltering air. Above him he could hear the clatter of the crew at work on the main deck, preparing for the upcoming mission. They were a good crew, well-oiled and highly trained over the years, needing almost no direction from him or the other officers of the ship. He drummed his fingers on the side table, listened to the rhythmic clatter of his finger tips. He hated working with outsiders.

The square of light on the main deck suddenly darkened, and his first mate, Portnoy Witherspoon clambered down the steep ladder and stood in the beam from above, his feathered cap shading his eyes from the light pouring down all around him.

“He’s coming on board, now,” Portnoy said, stepping out of the light beam and into the humid dankness. “You sure you want to let him on? I don’t trust their kind.”

Pike stood from his chair. “Sharktooth says this is the only way. The forces are too strong here for his ways, and this is the last place on earth for us to check. So, we’ll have to risk it.”

Pike walked over to the bulkhead and looked through the small circular window at the small island outside. Nearby, a mid-sized motorboat bobbed at anchor, its engine at a low idle, a dull moan drowned out by the lapping water and the occasional call of an overhead sea bird. Standing at the bow of the ship, Pike watched a man with a large rifle lean against the railing, confident in his position of power and worried about nothing.

“But don’t worry, Port ol’ boy, we’ve the upper hand here should it come to anything,” Pike said, turning from the window. “It won’t, though, they want what we want from all this.”

“They want the man, what do they care of anything else? The eye is useless to them,” Portnoy said.

“It is only useless to them ‘cause they don’t know what use it has,” said Sharktooth, emerging from behind a heavy canvas curtain in the darkness of a nearby corner. “We only know it’s somewhere in here because he’s been trying to use it for something. Otherwise, we’d still be sailing the seven seas looking for him.”

From above, there was a brief tune through a whistle followed by a measure of steps across the deck. Petty Officer Thurmond Desille leaned into the square of light and called down.

“Cap’n, the Arabs have come aboard, sir, shall I send ‘em down?” Thurmond asked.

“Yes, Thurmond, have our guests come down,” Pike said, his eyes sweeping over Sharktooth and Portnoy. “Behave yerselves and we’ll be through in no time. Don’t let ‘em trick you out of no information. Stay quiet and on task.”

Sharktooth raised a finger, “And don’t let him touch you.”

Chapter 21

Arris closed the novel, Killing Rommel by Steven Pressfield, and tossed it onto the bed. Whatever interest the subject might have held for his host was a mystery to Arris. The book was a fictionalization of the Long Range Desert Group, an ad hoc British commando unit from World War II that was notorious for shooting up Axis airfields deep behind enemy lines; anybody with any time in service in a special forces unit knew at least the outline of the story, and that outline did not include one of the commandos being captured by the Germans and personally released by Field Marshal Irwin Rommel. With as much actual history to construct a story from, Arris couldn’t understand why the author had felt the need to jump that shark. He was fairly certain the Long Range Desert Group had never even bothered to contrive an assassination plot, but who knew? Why the real stories were never enough for fiction writers sometimes mystified him, but, then, it wouldn’t have been fiction.

He walked out onto the balcony and looked down at the lawn, the shadows from the jungle beginning to lengthen across it as the sun set. After the meeting on the patio with the young man, Arris had seen nobody for the rest of the day. Well, not exactly nobody. There had been the boy in the jungle that had followed him to and from the mansion. Arris had spent a significant chunk of time on the beach, pretending to stare out into the sea but tense as a coiled spring, waiting for another attack from the natives, this time while alone. It never came. Instead, the boy had hovered in the scrim of short bushes at the edge of the jungle, crouched close to the ground, watching Arris intently, as if he would suddenly do something terrific.

After nothing happened, Arris made his way back through the jungle, walking slowly and listening to the near-silent progress of his shadow. The boy was alone, which Arris thought odd, given his age. Although, it was odd that there was anyone out in the jungle at all, watching the mansion – or perhaps just him – for some sort of activity. What was the teenage boy interested in? Nereika? If the boy were watching the mansion, though, Arris couldn’t understand why the boy didn’t have a partner, someone covering his back from the approach of someone like Arris. It wasn’t smart, or experienced.

The boy had stopped once Arris crossed through the bushes and onto the lawn. The boy had been stepping carefully through the underbrush a dozen yards away, attempting to mask his footfalls with Arris’, and then had dropped suddenly to the ground, trying to hide among the small plants as Arris parted the shrubbery and stepped onto the grass. Arris had resisted stopping to listen more to the boy’s progress, not wanting to give away the fact that Arris was on to the boy.

Instead, Arris crossed the lawn, ducked behind a low stone wall near a side entrance and crouch-walked his way along the mansion and back into the jungle. He had only to wait a few minutes before he heard the footfalls of the boy running, now having given up all pretense at surveillance and, apparently, eager to relate the findings of his observations.

Following the boy back to the natives’ camp was easy, although Arris slowed up and crept around the perimeter cautiously, at first, searching for any lookouts. There were none; no guards, no observation posts, no security installations of any sort. There was just jungle and then a large clearing, filled with ramshackle huts and a central fire pit, an island re-creation of every Third World dirt village Arris had ever seen. Poverty looked the same the world over, the common ingredients being salvaged building materials, crooked rough-hewn tree branches, thatch and despair. These people had been living in this spot for roughly two-hundred years, and in that time they had descended from a combination of pre-history African civilization and Dutch cultural achievement into a mélange society a National Geographic photographer would recognize as the natural state of man the world over.

And this in the near-shadow of an engineering miracle built into the side of a mountain not a kilometer away.

Arris had watched the village for about an hour, seeing nothing of interest to him and detecting no visible threats to the world beyond it. It was a fishing village, and the adult males were apparently out on whatever they used as boats, the remaining males either too young or too old for such work. The women maintained the camp, tended the fire, looked after the children and worked a couple of small vegetable gardens.

The boy’s breathless arrival stirred the camp’s interest for a while, with a grizzled village elder emerging from a hut to take a seat on a worn, rickety chair near the fire. Arris guessed the chair to be a spot of honor or authority, although nobody in the camp made any kind of ceremony toward it. The elder simply limped over to it, sat down, waved the women away and listened to whatever it was the boy had to say. From the distance, Arris couldn’t make out any of the words, though the guttural nature of the sounds that broke through the ambient noise of the jungle led him to believe it was most likely a form of Dutch.

Afterward, the boy melted away into the jungle on the far side of camp, apparently heading to the beach while the elder remained in the chair, staring at the small fire and occasionally poking an ember with a length of stick. This was all that Arris could take. He’d watched the activity in such villages scores of times over the past few years, although usually waiting for a target to emerge from a hut and hop in a four-wheeler, and was uninterested in the anthropological aspects of such cultures. If there were no terrorists, crime lords or drug dealers living amongst the filth, then there was nothing of interest for Arris. And, even then, there was little interest.

Chapter 22

Gregoire steered the boat into the sandy shallows of the beach, cut the engine and tossed the anchor far over the side, toward shore. The island was small, shaped like a crescent moon with a small rise in the middle, curving sandy beaches arcing away from him on either side. The water at the beach’s edge was sapphire blue, sparkling at the top of the wavelets with bursts of reflected sunlight.

He lifted the binoculars and scanned the shoreline in both directions, looking for any evidence of discarded gear, a hint of yellow inflatable vest or tossed-aside clothing. There was only the bleached white sand leading up to the thin scattering of scrub brush and trees, a shock of brown and green jutting up against the sky. He dropped the binoculars onto the seat in the cockpit, snugged his pistol into the waistband at the small of his back, and hopped into the knee-deep water at the bow of the ship.

Once ashore, he walked laterally along the beach, his eyes scanning in every direction, looking for any hint of human activity. Arris would’ve built a signal fire or constructed a lean-to were he here, alive; he wasn’t the sort of man, Gregoire knew, who would’ve simply propped himself up on a tree trunk in the shade and waited. Arris would’ve begun human civilization from scratch, starting with the basics, and not rested until he had running water and cable television. Gregoire smiled at the thought.

He made his way along the side of the rise in the middle of the island, not wanting to expose his silhouette above the crest and give away his position, an action that was second-nature to him after years in the African bush with the Legion. Near the top of the nipple which dominated the mid-section of the island, Gregoire dropped to his knees, concealing himself among the scrub grass and saplings. The opposite side of the island from where he had beached his boat melted off into the sea on either side of him, a small, shallow, miniature bay right below him: a natural harbor on a micro scale.

Smack-dab in the middle of it was a sixty-foot long wooden sloop, its rigging dropped and the sails rolled tightly. It was an antique, a boat from a time long gone, and the ship showed its age in its dubious seaworthiness. It should not have been there. If anything, it should be at the bottom of the sea off the North Carolina barrier islands or in some museum of ancient seafaring craft.

And it was not alone. Alongside it, bobbing in the gentle waves was a French P400 coastal patrol boat, one of the vessels being used by the drug cartel he had been tasked with shadowing just days earlier. Gregoire froze and slowly lowered himself to the ground, his ears now alert for sounds not connected to nature.

He worked his eyes inward from the watercraft, looking for signs of movement. To his left, just inside the line of short grass and stunted trees he made out a small collection of ramshackle structures. A pair of lean-tos and a three-walled wooden shack with a mottled, canvas-covered side facing the water, something a group of castaways might construct after a week or so of being stranded. In front of it was a circle of rocks surrounding a make-shift spit above darkened remnants of ash. A long log ran along one side of the fire circle, a smudge of black scorch marks on it.

Gregoire reached for the binoculars and grimaced; he had left them on the boat. He low-crawled laterally along the crest of the hill, moving slowly so as to disturb the underbrush as little as possible and not attract attention from any possible look-outs. The boats were just far enough away that he couldn’t make any details out about either, not that he thought there would be any identification on them. Neither was flagged, and the wooden sloop looked as if it had once been painted in a jigsaw puzzle pattern collection of blues, an attempt to camouflage it and blend it into the horizon where sea met sky. That paint job was long-since worn off and now resembled something more of a paint-by-numbers template started and forgotten by a young child.

He settled into a new position in a divot on the side of the hill and scanned the length of beach, again, looking for some evidence of recent activity. The boats simply bobbed in the water, their decks devoid of crew. And then he saw it, a blue-green inflatable skiff beached in the scrub grass to the other side of the collection of huts, the outboard motor pulled up. Someone was somewhere. Gregoire concentrated harder on the huts, straining to see some movement, some shifting in the shadows that might indicate the presence of a person in the shade. Nothing.

A peal from a horn suddenly pierced the calm of the island and Gregoire’s heart sank, adrenaline taking over a moment later. He turned over his shoulder and looked down at the beach behind him and saw a pair of men standing on the beach near his boat, one with a carved bone horn at his hip, both with rifles held at the ready, their heads turning quickly, searching for the boat’s owner.

“Merde!” Gregoire muttered under his breath, reaching to the small of his back for his Glock 27.

He slipped his other hand down to his belt for the satellite phone and shook his head in disbelief. It was still on the boat. Nobody would know where he was. He bit his lower lip and rolled his eyes skyward for a moment, just in time to see an orange fireball pop open in the air over the center of the island, an almost noiseless explosion that vanished into a tiny amount of white smoke that was quickly blown apart by the wind. Gregoire snapped his head back to his boat and saw the riflemen had been joined by a third figure, a man wearing a white-and-brown checkered shemagh around his head and pointing a small length of stick into the air.

It was the smuggler from the airstrip. It had to be, Gregoire thought, though the distance was too far for him to be certain and the headscarf concealed the figure’s face.

Gregoire crawled forward and down the side of the hill, trying to keep all of the boats in a line of sight from his position while still searching the land for more figures. Aboard the sloop, a group of figures stepped onto the deck from below ship and ran to the edge of the boat, scanning the shore for the cause of the warning flare. There was something wrong about how the men on the sloop moved, a herky-jerky sense to their motions that didn’t seem natural for seafaring men. But since they were a hundred meters out in the water, Gregoire only paid them peripheral attention, concentrating on the three men closer to him, standing near his boat, his way off the island.

Gregoire patted his tactical vest with his free hand and located the pair of flash-bang grenades, tapping them with his fingertips as he tried to devise an escape plan. He had no idea how well trained the men with the rifles were, how they might react to whatever he might do, so everything was a gamble against unknown odds. He hated not knowing the enemy’s capabilities or likely tactics, and so far his opponents were holding fast, waiting for him to make the first offensive move. That they were still standing out in the open on the beach, though, gave Gregoire some heart as he continued his low-crawl through the brush: they thought they had the upper hand.

And they would have, had Gregoire not remained low and slow along the ground, creeping forward by inches in slow, deliberate movements. Then a pair of boots suddenly materialized in the grass ahead of him, their owner facing away from him, training a rifle down the length of beach, covering the threesome. Gregoire paused to compose himself, evaluating the threat before him. The smuggler was armed with an AK-47 like the two men on the beach, and none of them had scopes on their weapons, meaning they weren’t expecting any sort of long-range action. Still, volume of fire accounted for much over an open stretch of beach.

Gregoire took a last look over his shoulder at the moored boats in the bay. Atop the sloop, the crew was jerkily lowering a row boat over the side, their backs to him. Gregoire could tell from their actions that this was a well-rehearsed task for them. He flicked his eyes over to the French patrol boat and saw a pair of men at the bow of the ship, one looking through binoculars at the beach, the other standing alongside him, a large caliber rifle with a scope crooked in his elbow and pointed skyward like any of the overly-cocky big game hunters Gregoire had watched in various African game preserves. That guy could be trouble, though.

Gregoire slowly slipped his Glock back in his waist band and crawled a dozen inches closer to the smuggler lying before him, raised himself up into a low push-up position, took a shallow breath and pounced on the man. Gregoire landed flat on the man’s back, the smuggler letting out a muffled gasp as the air was forced from his lungs. Quickly, Gregoire slapped the AK-47 from the man’s grasp, reached around the smuggler’s neck and grabbed his chin, twisting it violently around until Gregoire felt a small snap. The man went limp beneath him.

Gregoire rolled to his right and onto the rifle, picked it up and sighted it down the beach at the threesome near his boat. They were still looking around for evidence of Gregoire’s existence when he popped to a kneeling position and heaved a flash-bang grenade through the air and dropped back prone amidst the scrub grass, grabbing the AK-47 and nestling it against his shoulder. KA-POW! The blast was followed by a pair of surprised yells as the men on the beach covered their eyes too late. Gregoire pulled the trigger of the rifle quickly, letting a volley of bullets rain through their position before releasing the trigger and quickly rolling several feet to his right.

The sand where he had just been lying exploded a micro-second before Gregoire heard the thunderclap of the rifle from the boat in the bay. Gregoire flipped onto his back, sighted the weapon through his feet in the general direction of the boat and squeezed the trigger for a second, hoping the muzzle flash and rapid sound of gunfire would make the men on deck duck for cover. The man with the binoculars dropped them, crouched and covered his head; Gregoire could see the men rowing the boat cresting the bow of the sloop, the oars rising and falling in perfect harmony. The man with the rifle was still pointing it in Gregoire’s general direction, however.

Gregoire rolled again to the right, moving several feet away from a just-exploding area of sand, only this time the rush of adrenaline drowned out the sound of the rifle crack. Gregoire sighted down on the beach and saw the three men running for cover, the two with rifles bee-lining for the nearest scrub grass while the man in the shemagh strode quickly in the opposite direction. Gregoire squeezed the trigger, aiming at the two riflemen, sand kicking up all around their feet and hastening them along. Then the AK-47 stopped suddenly, the clip out of ammunition.

He let the rifle go and sprang forward quickly, grabbing his pistol from his waistband and pointing it at the men in the grass, certain they hadn’t figured out his location, yet, but knowing it wouldn’t take long to notice a man sprinting across the beach toward the boat.

ZZZzzzzeehhBASH! The brush to the right of Gregoire suddenly burst into fire, a brief flash of orange erupting in his peripheral vision as he crossed the threshold from flora to sand. Gregoire pointed his pistol in the general direction of the man in the shemagh, saw him standing about a hundred meters away, training the stick on Gregoire, as if directing artillery fire for a hidden observation post.

And then the twin rat-a-tat of a pair of AK-47s filled the air to his left. Gregoire paid them no heed and ran into the shallow water, high-stepping the dozen feet along the anchor line to the edge of the boat, the surface of the water letting loose with small splashes as bullets sliced through it.

ZZZzzzzeehhBASH! Searing hot pain splashed across Gregoire’s left bicep and deltoid muscles, the clothing incinerated, his skin erupting in burn welts and scorch marks. For a moment, the world around Gregoire had been engulfed in orange fire, and in the instant it subsided he noticed the anchor line of the boat had been burnt through and was smoldering. Gregoire grunted through the pain and heaved himself over the edge of the boat. He crawled quickly to the cockpit, pressed the engine start button and pushed the throttle into reverse, just barely lifting his head above the plane of the boat’s hull.

The smugglers with the AKs were rushing toward the water’s edge as Gregoire’s boat puttered back at full speed. The hull of the boat pinged from bullet strikes several times as Gregoire spun the steering wheel to turn away from the shore, exposing the side of the boat to the riflemen. And then Gregoire pushed the throttle all the way forward, the boat pitching up for a second as the propellers bit hard into the water, a rooster plume erupting from the middle of the boat’s wake as it lunged out toward open sea. Gregoire looked back quickly over his shoulder, one last glance at the beach. A stray bullet punched a hole through the windscreen to Gregoire’s right.

He held the steering wheel steady, pointing straight away from the island and heading for the horizon. Getting over the edge of horizon and out of the line-of-sight was the only way he was going to have to avoid the French patrol boat, should it come after him.

He glanced down at his left shoulder and felt the intense heat on the surface of his skin, a second-degree burn that could have done more damage had he not been wearing clothing. Taking care of it would have to wait awhile, though, as he had water to put between him and the island.

Chapter 23

Arris spent the rest of the afternoon in his guest room, napping. If there had been one thing his years in the Army had ingrained in him, it was that there were never enough opportunities for rest once a mission had begun, and any spare moments for catching up on sleep were to be taken. Since his current predicament left him with no mission details to correct, no equipment to tend and no men to instruct, he felt no qualms about idling the rest of the day in sleep. That and his mission had ended days ago in disaster, technically speaking, turning Arris into a rescue mission for the rest of the team. Staying put and being well-rested to respond to their actions was the logical choice given he had no way of getting off the island by his own means. And, anyway, there was a re-supply boat coming to the island in a day or so, so he felt no hurry to abandon his respite in paradise, as weird as this version of it was.

He padded across the stone floor in his bare feet and pushed through the doors onto the balcony outside his room. It seemed an odd way to live, alone on an island in the middle of the ocean, willingly detached from civilization and all its modern conveniences. Arris wasn’t one for sitting on the couch watching television, but he liked having a television and the opportunity to while away time in a make-believe movie world. Although he mostly watched history or science programs, subjects he could plug back into the real world, at least theoretically. Not that he missed having a television in his room or in the mansion, but it’s absence seemed odd to him, given their ubiquity in the modern world.

He looked out over the tree tops and breathed deeply, the sea air reaching his nostrils. Come to think of it, he didn’t miss any of the things he used on a daily basis back in his life at home. For a moment, he even didn’t miss his life, his house, his car, the computer at the work station in the basement, the refrigerator, microwave, cell phone or the never-ending stream of bills, junk mail and credit offers the postman stuffed into his mailbox six days a week. There was something to be said about the simple life.

He smiled to himself cynically. This wasn’t the simple life. Arris turned and scanned the length of the mansion: this was the high life mocking the simple life. Everything here was done by people living a simpler life; somewhere, servants cleaned the place, prepared the meals, and maintained the grounds. Someone else brought food to wherever the kitchen was; someone else labored daily to provide Onorien the luxury of not having to grub about in the dirt extracting life’s necessities.

This was the high life.

Everywhere else in the world, people yearned, knowingly or not, for the conveniences that made life easier, for just-add-water boxes of food; for cold, pasteurized milk readily available in a refrigerated case; for the instant connectivity of a cellular phone; for the banal normality of the ready availability of an ice cube. Those who already had that, Arris thought, wanted something like this on the side: a way to get away from it all and yet still not want.

Arris thought about the hours spent in the water under the hot Caribbean sun only days earlier, the salt water lapping at his face as he bobbed in the open sea. His lips had become dry and he had felt the skin on his face burning from exposure, and he had thought briefly of how a simple tube of lip balm and a baseball cap would’ve made his life infinitely easier. But he longed for those things for only a moment, knowing that letting his mind wander away from the reality of his situation was a sure way to turn it into a death spiral.

So he had floated and taken inventory of the things he did have, the items in his make-shift “civilian” emergency vest, a tricked out fishing vest rigged up by the company and stuffed with as many civilian versions of what was normally carried in a military vest. He hadn’t expected to use it as anything other than a prop, so he hadn’t initially bothered with it as he had floated in the current. A quick inventory-by-touch turned up an orange signal panel in one of the pockets, and he had folded that in half and tied it around his head as a bandana, shielding him from the sun and giving anyone looking for him a one-in-a-billion odds increase of seeing him in the sea of blue-green water.

His emergency radio hadn’t worked. Or, if it had, nobody was picking up his calls in the blind, so he had turned it off and floated along, hoping to see an airplane that he might be able to contact. He saw nothing until dusk settled in, the point at which the first tendrils of despair had begun to wriggle into his consciousness. He had been floating for more than a dozen hours in the sun, and now he would have to face the ocean alone through the night, the world’s largest sensory deprivation chamber. The stars populated the sky and the moon slowly rose, but it was the smallest comfort, only proof of infinity extending outward from his tiny endpoint in the universe. Then he had seen a charcoal smudge of against the darkness of the horizon. He made some effort toward paddling toward it, but the hours of floating under the sun had sapped him of much of his strength.

And then the current grabbed him, some unseen hand in the water directing him to the shadowy protuberance rising from the ocean. His feet touched the bottom of the sea, the beginning of the slope up to the shore of the beach of the island. He had stumbled drunkenly through the surf, his arms and legs slack, his eyes burning from lack of saltwater, his mind wandering feverishly, trying to latch onto the new reality. He would live. At least, for a little while longer.

He had stood under the night sky for a few moments after breaking free of the surf, stared at the billions of stars above him, the moon low on the horizon, and given a brief thought to trying to find some evidence of civilization, some outpost of mankind. This was the Caribbean, after all, and there weren’t uninhabited islands, so a resort had to be nearby. A few steps further in, though, and reality managed a brief return to his senses, and he gauged his distance from the waterline and guessed at the high tide mark, trudged as far up onto the beach as he could muster, and collapsed, rolling onto his back at the last moment of consciousness and hoping his final vision of life on planet Earth was not a million-light-year stare into the depths of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Although, he thought now, opening his eyes to the jungle before him, that might be a beautiful thing to see as you shuffled off your mortal coil: infinity.

“Quite a view of tranquility, is it not, Mr. Arris?” asked Onorien from behind him. “I never tire of it.”

Arris turned and saw his host standing in the doorway, unsurprised by the older man’s stealth while curious at his apparent need to simply show up unannounced.

“Indeed, Doctor,” Arris said, turning and smiling.

“I hope my absence today wasn’t a problem for you?” Onorien said, stepping onto the balcony and surveying the jungle.

“Problem? Nah,” Arris said, shaking his head, “I read another one of your thrillers to kill the time. I can see why people like them; you can open one up and speed right through it in no time and, when you’re done, there’s no nagging literature professor in the back of your skull asking you if there was any meaning to it. It’s just a way to kill time and occupy your mind.”

Onorien smiled ever-so-slightly. “So much of life is killing time and occupying one’s mind, Mr. Arris, especially now that we humans live so long and have the time to while away, at least for those of us with the good fortune to have been born or raised in the modern world. Most people are still out there behind a team of oxen, wading through a rice paddy knee-deep in water or standing at some machine in a factory, stamping out trinkets they must wonder who has any use for.

“So many people labor to create the impermanent, burning through the hours of their life as effortlessly as blinking, never aware of the wonders of living. Does the Chinaman toiling over a plastic mold in Peking know he is trading his life’s days away to create instantly disposable trinkets some fast food chain will stuff in a paper sack for some child in Chicago and his mother will pitch in the garbage the next day?

“Is the Indian slaving away in a textile mill in Bombay even remotely aware some woman in Paris will look at herself in the blue jeans he’s sewn together and wonder if they flatter her legs sufficiently? Does the Bangladeshi taxi driver hustling Londoners around town ever give a thought to the hours some information technology specialist spent puzzling over the best ergonomic design for the button placement on the cellular phone he barely notices is in his hand all day?

“This is life in the modern world, Mr. Arris, and so many of us spend so much of our time completely unaware that we are even alive, living on the most beautiful planet mankind has ever seen,” Onorien said.

Arris shrugged. “Well, you gotta do something.”

Onorien let out a chuckle. “Yes … yes, you do.”

Onorien kept up the same line of conversation through dinner, musing about the nature of the modern world and its endless conveniences, how they separated man from his nature and made him into something else, something less than what nature intended. Arris had heard this line of argument before, during dinner parties with his wife’s friends, intricate meals cooked with modern conveniences and exotic ingredients from the world over by hosts who decried the congestion of local freeways or shook their heads in disbelief that reduced calorie beers were so much more readily available – and popular – than whatever Sonoma Valley wine was being served.

Arris had never said anything at such dinners, not even the time a co-worker of his wife’s remarked on a comment about the meatballs the hostess was serving, noting to the guest that the “secret” ingredient was quinoa, a slightly-difficult to find grain the hostess had used in them. The table had buzzed for a few moments about quinoa, various foodie types remarking on the versatility and healthfulness of the grain and how it was so rare in the diet of the average American. Arris was intimately familiar with it from the months he had once spent in the Andes training local militiamen to defend their villages against the drug traders nearby.

But that was not Onorien’s line of thinking, Arris realized. Onorien wasn’t some well-to-do eco-warrior secluding himself from the modern world, nor was he a garden-variety environmentalist or animal rights activist upset with the way man was using the planet and its resources. The more Onorien talked, the more Arris realized that Onorien was somehow upset with mankind, as if humanity had faced a choice at some point in the past and had chosen a course at odds with the one Onorien would’ve picked.

Onorien didn’t lament the rise of the industrial world, so far as Arris could tell. Onorien almost seemed to be arguing that all of the progress mankind had made over the last – how long? Arris couldn’t determine – millennia had taken humans in the wrong direction, a direction not exactly at odds with nature, but certainly in competition with it. Onorien argued without specificity that there had been another way forward and that this way was still available, that man could be whole and at-one with the world, harmonious in existence with the “life force that binds all living things together.”

This caught Arris’ attention. “The what?”

Arris had not said much during the dinner, content to listen to his host’s monologue. Nereika had simply sat at the far end of the table, picking at her food, a mixture of extreme boredom and total adulation at odds on her face, as if she had heard this speech a thousand times before but still found something fresh in it each time.

“Ether, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “At one time, ether was thought to be the binding force of the world, the unknowable all-pervasive element that made the world work. It explained how light and sound was transmitted through the air, it was the force that allowed electromagnetism to work as it does. Indeed, it held the planets in place around the sun, and explained why the stars are where they are. Ether, Mr. Arris, was the explanation for how the unseen world worked, and many scientists spent their entire lives trying to identify it, to find it at work, to explain it to the common man.”

“Yeah, well, we know how all that stuff works,” Arris said, “and I don’t remember any of my teachers ever mentioning ‘ether’ as a reason.”

Onorien nodded and tipped a little wine from his glass into his mouth, let it pause on his tongue for a moment, and gazed calmly at Arris.

“No, I don’t suppose any teacher has taught a student about ether in a very long time,” Onorien said, “but just because scientists don’t believe in it any longer doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Science explains the modern world, but it only explains the world science has created by observing the world according to a specific set of rules. Science only explains how things work, not why they work.”

“That sounds like a pretty thin hair to be splitting,” Arris said. “What do you mean ‘why’ things work?”

“We suppose we know much about how the world works, don’t we, Mr. Arris? We can explain, for instance, how water turns into ice, or how adding carbon to iron turns it into steel. We can even explain how an atom works,” Onorien said. “But nobody can explain why any of these things do what they do.”

Not you, either, Arris thought as he listened. He was trapped in this conversation for as long as Onorien would drag it out, he realized, and suddenly wished he could take his leave to smoke a cigarette out on the lawn, as he would have had he been at a normal dinner party, excusing himself with a mixture of faux nicotine withdrawal and a hapless mini-shrug that he was a slave to his habit. But he had no cigarettes and he was the only guest, two issues that would make any sudden departure from the dining room awkward and rude. Arris was about to get a lecture on a subject he was fairly certain he wanted to know nothing about and, just as he had dozens of times before with village elders in tribal areas across the world, all he could do was sit still, smile, and sip whatever passed for the social drink.

“Ether, Mr. Arris, is the energy force that breathes life into everything that lives. Everything that lives consumes it, either directly or indirectly. It is transferable and malleable,” Onorien said, standing and motioning for Arris to do likewise.

Onorien stopped by a side table and motioned to the bottles on it. “A cognac?”

Arris nodded. “Sounds good.”

Onorien poured two glasses, pushed one to the side for Arris, and walked out of the room. They went down the hallway a short distance and turned into Onorien’s study, a journey that discombobulated Arris for a moment: he hadn’t realized the two rooms were so close. Arris paused a moment after crossing the threshold, trying to get his bearings, once again trying to figure out how the interior of the mansion connected. For a moment, the word “tesseract” flashed through his mind, but when he tried to remember what the word meant, it vanished from his consciousness, replaced by words his eyes transmitted to his brain based on what they were looking at. Arris almost felt drunk, though he knew he hadn’t had anywhere near enough to drink. He resisted the urge to shake his head and concentrated instead on the feel of the floor through his feet, creating an artificial horizon upon which he knew he could not count, but at least something to use as a starting point for any other movement.

Onorien pushed the doors to the veranda open and stepped through them, tilting his snifter to indicate that Arris should follow. Outside, night had fallen. The jungle around them made no noise save for the wind pushing through the foliage; Arris could almost hear the sound of the surf, the gentle roar of waves crashing on sand. Maybe he was drunk?

“Ether, Mr. Arris, is everywhere around us,” Onorien said, standing by the railing and looking out toward the horizon. “It is the power that drives everything on the planet; everything that lives uses it. It is the ‘why’ to how things work.”

Arris steadied himself, setting his snifter on the railing and placing his hands on either side. Ether? He had almost forgotten the topic of conversation that had led them outside.

“The power of life comes from the sun. Every energy source on the planet, all life exists because of it,” Onorien said. “Herbivore, carnivore, even the smallest, most insignificant single-cell life form lives because of the sun. Plants take the energy of the sun and convert it through photosynthesis into life. Animals – some of them, anyway – feed on the plants, taking from them the essential energy to live. Other animals feed on those animals, transferring once again, from form to form, the vital essence of the universe, the energy to live.

“All living things die, but the energy of their lives does not. Instead, it is converted, once again, into stored energy: crude oil, natural gas, coal, what have you,” Onorien said. “Everything that lives or has lived is energy, power, life force. Everything that lives seeks a way to tap into it, to take the essence from another and transfer it to the self.

“It is a source of energy so powerful that everything that lives must obey one command: create life. No living thing on the planet, Mr. Arris, can resist this command of the universe, the command to go forth and multiply. Not even the universe itself can ignore this simple directive. The scientists of the world tell you that the universe wasn’t until it was, a sudden cataclysmic moment in which all that wasn’t instantly became that which is, and all that there was at that moment obeyed this one simple, inevitable command: go forth and multiply.

“And now we have infinite galaxies teeming with infinite suns surrounded by an infinity of planets. Out of nothing there is everything, and everything continues to create more of that from which it came. An atom in the vacuum of space yearns for another atom to become something it is not; a human seeks another not for the comfort of conversation, not for the warmth of an embrace, but for the solitary, ineffable desire to create one more,” Onorien said, lifting his glass and taking a sip of cognac.

“Why do we exist to witness this wonder, Mr. Arris? Why is the world, the universe, life so unknowably complex that every time some scientist discovers some heretofore hidden aspect of living, it only opens up more paths to that which we do not know? Why is there no end to knowledge, to facts, to understanding?”

Arris blinked hard and felt reality seep back into his mind. He glanced at Onorien out of the corner of his eye and Arris wondered what his part of the discussion was supposed to be. Arris had no answers to these rhetorical questions and he was fairly certain Onorien had none, too.

“I don’t know,” Arris said.

“Because we are meant to have faith in it all, Mr. Arris, not understanding,” Onorien said. “We cannot comprehend infinity, and we are not meant to. We are meant merely to have faith that there is infinity.”

“Faith?” Arris said, the word forced from his lips unconsciously, almost incredulously.

“Yes,” Onorien said, “faith.”

“Like believing in God?”

“If you must, if that helps, then, yes,” Onorien said. “But God does not reveal himself in any way that we can know, does He? He requires that you have faith that He exists.”

Arris was confused. For a moment, he had figured he and Onorien were going to be talking about the infinite complexities of the universe and man’s thirst for knowledge, but now the conversation had taken a sharp turn into the metaphysical. He didn’t have anything to add to the original line of thought let alone bringing religion into it.

“Are you trying to say religion and science are the same things?” Arris asked.

“No, not exactly. They are, however, two sides of the same coin. Science asks how, religion, if you will, asks why,” Onorien said. “Through science, man attempts to learn the unknowable and constantly finds that there is yet another unknown thing to learn as a result. Religion, God, faith … the Divine World asks us only to believe that it exists, to have faith that what is truly is.

“And what is is that we are all part of the same spectrum, the same life force, an unbreakable chain of being that extends in all directions, through all time. We need only have faith in this truth to access its power, to harness it to our needs, to be at peace with ourselves and the universe that surrounds us. One does not need to know how to split an atom to harness its power; one only needs to have the faith that it can be split.”

Arris resisted a little laugh. “What? With my mind?”

Onorien smiled and stepped toward Arris, reached out his hand and placed the tip of his pointer finger ever-so-near Arris’ forehead, but without touching him. “The mind is where faith resides.”

Under almost any other circumstance, Arris would’ve stepped back at Onorien’s approach, would’ve flinched, at least internally, at being closed in on in such a manner. Instead, it almost seemed natural, as if Onorien were some paternal figure in Arris’ life, offering a valuable timeworn lesson and reinforcing it with a simple gesture.

Onorien stepped back and motioned with his head for Arris to follow. “Come.”

Onorien walked down the stone veranda and pulled open a door with glass panes and wrought iron work, paused and allowed Arris to walk in before him. Arris took a few steps in and stopped in a mixture of awe and disbelief.

“Wow, you’ve got your own natural history museum right here on the island,” Arris said plainly, although he was slightly amazed Onorien had yet another odd room up his sleeve.

Weapons of antiquity were set up across the room: swords, pikes, halberds, maces, and daggers each rested on stands, small spotlights shining down on them from the ceiling. He walked to the closest table and looked down at the dagger, an eight-inch length of what appeared to be of bronze manufacture, with an intricate pommel behind a blade that curved ever-so-slightly. Arris quickly scanned the rest of the room, skipping past the oddball collection of artifacts and checking for exits – an old habit long ingrained in him.

“It’s more than a room full of antiques, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said, closing the door and striding past Arris into an open space near the middle of the room. “These are artifacts of extremely rare pedigree.”

“Well, they look old,” Arris said, moving from table to table and glancing at the items on each. He paused to stare down at a scroll, a rolled up length of thick yellow paper wrapped around a wooden dowel rod with decorative painting on each handle. Now, he took in the rest of the room, noting more than just weapons, but objects such as books, quarterstaffs, small lengths of intricately detailed batons and a random scattering of pieces of armor of various types: chain mail, plate, and studded-leather. On other tables, he noticed jewelry or gem stones, out in the open, on display as if there were no worries of a passing thief.

Onorien watched as Arris meandered about the room; Arris was aware of his host’s gaze, wondered if it meant he was supposed to ask something about what he saw or if he was supposed to exhibit some measure of wonder. None of the weaponry was strange or unusual to Arris, though all of it was obsolete my modern standards. His official day job had long since trained him in the basic use of most of the weapons – he and Gregoire officially worked for a movie production company that trained Hollywood actors in military protocols and the use of weapons, both modern and ancient, so Arris was decently proficient in the use of bladed weapons – and the other objects in the room seemed to him little more than relics or collectibles somewhat more authentic looking than similar items he had seen on movie sets.

He moved to another table and stared down at a bowling ball-sized globe on a stand, the silvery-black sheen of the glass seeming to both not reflect light and yet give off some barely-detectable shimmer. Arris turned to Onorien.

“Is this a crystal ball?”

Onorien smiled slightly. “It is.”

Arris glanced back down at it. “I mean, is this supposed to be a crystal ball you could use to talk with someone else?”

“It might, if there were anyone else who had one and knew how to use it,” Onorien said, taking a few steps through the room toward the table. “But the world is not full of people with faith in such objects, so if there were anyone out there with one, it is unlikely they would possess the idea that it could be made to work. So, it is simply a crystal ball.”

“You see these all the time in psychics’ houses,” Arris said. “At least, you do on television shows with a psychic as a character. Kind of a standard-issue prop to let you know you’re looking at someone with mystical abilities to commune with the dead or something like that.”

Onorien shook his head ever-so-slightly. “Charlatans, Mr. Arris. Psychics are no more than confidence men preying on the ignorance of others. They believe in the performance of their con, not the divine nature of the world. They have no faith they can do what they claim, only the understanding that they can use overwhelming persuasion on the weak-minded to convince them they are seeing that which is not really there.”

“Like a magic trick?”

“Sleight-of-hand. Misdirection. Convincing a person to see that which is not really there is not magic,” Onorien said. “A man who can regurgitate a key while in a tank of water so he can open a padlock while blindfolded behind a curtain is not performing a feat of magic; he’s vomiting a key into his hand. The world knows nothing of magic anymore, Mr. Arris; it’s forgotten to time, buried under the crush of history and the rise of religion and science.

“Once upon a time, all that man understood was considered divine. All things were connected, the energy of all living beings contributed to the locomotion of the world. Man killed an animal for dinner and gave thanks to the animal for giving its life up so that the man and his kin could live a little longer. Man had an understanding that all life came from the sun, an understanding hard won coming out of the ice ages before, that the sun and life were inextricably connected. Without the sun there were no plants; without plants, no animals; with no animals, no man.

“Thus, the force that connected all living things was understood, and that force is the ether that permeates every living thing. That understanding gave belief that that force could be harnessed, directed, even transmuted so that man’s life on this planet could be easier. Man came to recognize his place atop the chain of life on the planet, understood that there had to be a reason he was given an understanding of the lifecycle that no other living thing had.

“Man came to understand he was a divine creature, made from the same stuff as all life, but given something extra the universe withheld from all else, and that created faith in a higher order, a higher purpose to life. If man could just harness this faith in his divine position, believe that there was more to the world than what could be seen with eyes or heard with ears, then man could merge with the universe and harness the powers of the heavens.”

Arris tipped the last of his cognac into his mouth and let it roll across his tongue, concentrating on the rich flavors of the liquid, feeling the twinge of alcohol near the back of his throat as he swallowed. He could tell Onorien was earnest in his – the word escaped him for a second, and then he remembered it from a Saturday afternoon spent with his kids years ago: “monologuing” – but Arris had no idea why Onorien would bother with such a long explanation. Was Onorien extolling paganism? Sun worship? Some sort of proto-environmentalism?

“So, you’re a man of faith of some sort?” Arris asked, turning his head through the room and scanning the various items on display. These were not holy relics, but creations of man hammered out of iron or carved from wood.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Arris, most definitely,” Onorien said. “Mankind believed in this for thousands of years, created a variety of early religions centered on this very belief that man was of the universe. We created religions in which super-humans were our creators, gods with access to all the powers of the heavens, powers that could be transferred to man by the gods. Men could, even, become gods if their faith in their gods’ powers held true. Indeed, the gods would often choose men to test, set men against gods or their agents on earth, just to see how far a man’s faith could be stretched.

“Mankind believed this until he created new religions to replace those ones, new religions which said the powers of life were outside of our reach, exceeded our grasp, that we were mere mortals intended to scrape out an existence from the dirt and water of the planet. We humans became divine only in the sense that we were created by a god to live on the planet among the animals,” Onorien said. “Indeed, we became animals, sentient apes descended from some unknowable tree of life, little removed from the beasts of burden we used to plow fields. Faith became something religion used to control the people; believe in this, do that, and you shall get your reward in the next life.

“The religions of the world, these new ones with unitary gods who reign behind curtains and promulgate rules sets through priest classes, banned belief in the Divine Arts, pronounced ‘magic’ to be the realm of heathens, the unclean, of heretics. Those who refused were driven into the fringes of society, banished into the woods, where the old ways became things of scorn or proof of some primitive tribalism that threatened civilization.

“And, now, we see the rise of science in the world, a godless religion that attempts to show how the world works, what the powers of the universe are and how they are inter-connected. And mankind takes another step away from the truth of his purpose in life, relying on a new group of self-appointed members of a new priest class to tell them how to best live their lives,” Onorien said. “Is it any wonder why so much of the world you spend so much of your time in is such a mess, what with all the competing ideologies on how one should live one’s life?”

Arris shrugged. “Yeah, well, science kinda seems to work out okay at the end of the day,” Arris said, motioning to a small, slender length of gilt-inlaid ivory set on a display stand. “What happened when the magic these saps were supposed to believe in failed to show up when the guy wielding whatever-this-is showed up for a fight and the other guy had an actual sword in his hand?”

“You assume that the wielder of that wand did not truly believe it would work because you have no faith that it would work. You don’t really think someone would show up for the fight of his life with such a thing if he didn’t truly believe it would work, if he did not have the utmost faith in it?” Onorien said.

Onorien cocked his head slightly at Arris and spread his arms out to the sides, “All of the items in this room, Mr. Arris, were regarded by their original owners to have magical powers, to be divine instruments of one kind or another. This is what they believed. This is what they had faith in.”

Arris was unconvinced and motioned to the ivory wand on the table. “Yeah, but my point is, this is just a stick with some paint on it.”

Arris turned his attention back to Onorien and caught sight of a sword mounted on a wall. He approached it and stared at it reverently. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, and he’d handled plenty of swords both on and off sound stages, teaching background extras and actors playing minor characters how to properly and safely handle a sword so as to appear genuine on screen. This sword was different.

“This is cool,” Arris said, moving in close.

The sword was short, a 26-inch blade coming out of a one-handed hilt tightly wrapped in black leather. The metal of the sword was black, too, something Arris had never seen before; some blades were very dark gray or steel-blue, but nothing he’d ever come across was so pitch black it refused to reflect light. He bent toward it and noticed faint glyphs carved into the length of the blade on either side of the fuller that ran down the center of the blade. In the base of the hilt he noticed a small green gemstone set into the pommel, a tiny piece of crystal that was the purest color of translucent green Arris had ever seen with his naked eye, almost as if someone had bottled the green ray from a beam of white light shone through a prism.

“That, Mr. Arris is the Divine Blade commissioned by a German baron in the early 1800s,” Onorien said. “Baron Ewald von Hoth, to be precise.”

Chapter 24

A storm raged at night, the darkness split open by spidery tendrils of electricity and shattered by cacophonous booms of thunder. Baron Ewald von Hoth’s castle stood atop a low rise, overlooking a valley of farm fields, a collection of peasant houses not far outside the main gate. In the distance, near a swollen riverbank, a small village shivered under the storm’s onslaught, illuminated by flashes from the heavens. The wind howled and bent trees. Rain punished anything in the open, turning dirt roads into bogs.

The baron paced in a candlelit room of his small castle, his face set with uncertainty and worry. Hoth had come to the frightening realization that the world he lived in was not entirely the world he had been raised by the Church to believe in, that there were other forces at work, mysterious and dark forces that hid in the shadows, lurking, waiting for opportunities to intrude in the lives of men. And now he was going against all of the teachings of his life, investing his future in a course of action that he had never really believed existed, and he was afraid he had acted too late.

How could he have known? How could anyone have been expected to believe there was another world just beyond the shadows, hiding in the twilight?

Another round of thunder shook the stones of the castle, drafts of wind accelerated through the cracks around the windows, slipped in quickly through doorways and flickered the candles of the room. A ripple of lighting flashed through the room, briefly overwhelming the candlelight and casting long shadows in all directions. The air in the room grew cold. Hoth walked to the fireplace and stuck his hands in front of it. He turned from the fire, his face uncertain.

“God would not desert me in my hour of need, would He?”

The man to whom Hoth spoke stood near a window on the other side of the room, staring through the glass at the storm outside. The man’s hair was long, pulled into a ponytail with an indigo length of ribbon; his hair was white but still possessed streaks of its original black. The man was dressed not dissimilarly from the baron, but his clothes were different. To Hoth, they gave off a curious, almost indefinable and barely noticeable hue of purple, though they were, for the most part, a collection of brown materials.

“You cannot be so sure of God’s plan, Ewald,” the man said, turning and fingering a walking cane, rolling it in the fingers of his hands. “All we can do is try to direct it to our purpose.”

The storm churned violently outside and the man turned back to the window, cocked his head to the side and stared into the cloud-choked night sky. He raised the walking stick up to his chin and closed his eyes, his lips moving almost imperceptibly, the sounds of his words drowned out by the timpani of thunder unleashed by the storm. Hoth watched curiously, as the man lifted the walking stick a few more inches and then quickly jerked it down toward his waist.

KA-BOOM! A crack of noise louder and more violent than any before shattered the storm for a moment, almost quieted it; the air shook and the candle flames nearly snuffed out. Hoth’s eyes grew wide at the sound; he’d never heard anything like it. It was almost as if the air had been split asunder. The man smiled and turned toward Hoth.

“Ewald, your prayer has been answered,” the man said, motioning with the tip of the cane out the window.

Hoth strode quickly across the room and stepped between the man and the window, looking through the panes at the small boulder lying in a large depression in the muddy yard outside. Hoth was astonished, shocked to see the inky black spheroid in the divot outside. Nearby, stone benches were overturned from the force of the impact; a marble statue of his grandfather laid on its side, its upraised sword buried in mud up to its hilt.

Hoth rushed from the room, down corridors of the castle and took the steps to the first floor in pairs, unable to contain his enthusiasm. For months he had been haunted in his dreams, seen shapes in shadows cast by candlelight, wondered constantly if the snickered words of the old woman could be true: the demon is going to come for you now. He hadn’t believed it at first, much in the same way that he had only partially believed – and partially was much too strong a way to describe it – that his wife possessed some sort of innate magical abilities.

She was magical. She was also far below his class, the youngest daughter of the dairy farmer who tended his herd of cattle on the far edge of his estate. He had known her since she was a young girl, ignoring his father’s admonition not to mix with the peasantry, even for sexual gratification. But Hoth had never been able to stay away for long, and, as the girl grew, Hoth had yearned for her more. Everyone had noticed, and the dairy farmer’s wife had encouraged the girl to spend time with Hoth on his many visits to inspect the herd. When the girl had reached marrying age and rumors began to spread of her potential to be engaged to the butcher’s son, Hoth had descended into a frenetic state of despair: he couldn’t let the girl marry this other man, this boy, this butcher’s son; but he was forbidden by social codes to marry her, discouraged by discretion from even bedding her for fear of creating a bastard.

And then the old woman had come into the picture one morning in the market place of the village. It was just a few weeks after Hoth’s father had died, leaving Hoth the new master of the estate, a bachelor baron alone but for servants in a smallish castle in a valley along a lonely river. The old woman: the basket weaver’s mother. Hoth hadn’t even had a need for a basket; he had merely ridden to the village for the cold comfort of being around people, even people with whom he could not properly mingle. People who weren’t servants, at least not in name, people who could, in theory, ignore him as just another person.

The old woman had only said “You can have whatever you like, now you’re the master,” as he had turned a basket through his hands, examining the work of the craftsman who had made it. He had looked up at the old woman; she sat on a small stool in a corner of the of the stand, chewing on a cud, an almost-toothless half-smile on her lips as she looked at him through cataracts.

“Of course I would pay the fair price,” he had said, trying to sound reasonable, understanding of the commoners who lived in his barony.

“Of course, m’lord,” the old woman said. “There’s always a price though it’s not always fair, but you must do what your heart tells you is true.”

The old woman glanced around the stand, her eyes searching the through the street, never focusing on anything but looking for something, the expression on her face a mixture of dread and possibility. The look held Hoth fast. He knew of the old woman, second-hand, from stories over-heard in the castle kitchen, asides whispered by servants in hallways, half-giggled stories told by older women at dinner parties. It was said she could read tea leaves and tell a person’s future based on the positions of the stars, but he had never given the stories a moment’s consideration.

She leaned forward through the shade and poked her face into a shaft of sunlight near the front of the stall; her cragged face put in stark contrast with her dull eyes and blackened teeth. She licked her lips and stared up into Hoth’s face, locking her dead eyes on his.

“The girl can save you, master Hoth, if you can save her, first,” the old woman said. “Avenge your grandfather’s honor, restore your family’s name; only, you must find a way to harness the magic inside the milk maiden’s mind. But if you do marry her, the evil will come looking for you from out of the depths of hell, so you will have to be ready.”

The old woman glanced quickly around, checked over her shoulder through the entryway that led from the stand into the wooden hut behind it. “But you’ll need help if you’re to unlock her fortune, to release her gift before she becomes too old and set in her ways and finds herself cursed with the bottoms of cups or staring at the moon. There’s a man who knows the ways of the unseen world, a man who can control the ether that binds all life, but you won’t have long to find him after you consummate your union with the girl, for the devil’s spawn will feel the change and come looking for their supper.”

Hoth was taken aback inside though he had remained composed in the old woman’s presence. He wasn’t entirely surprised that the old woman had heard of his marriage offer to the girl; he had been certain the word would get around after he had spoken with her father, but the old woman’s sudden disclosure discomfited Hoth in a way he was unable to reconcile. He had no idea what to make of her words, so foreign to him were the ideas that they verged on incoherence.

“What?” he had asked, placing the basket down and turning to see if his man-at-arms was nearby, not out of concern for his safety, but to see if the man had over-heard the old woman’s outburst of fortune-telling.

“The girl has a magic inside her, m’lord, a power she only feels as a dream,” the old woman said. “It can be unlocked and made whole, and your marital union will be like a key to the lock, opening the door, but once the door is opened, any can walk through until closed from the other side. And the first one through to bolt the passageway from the inside will have her power unto himself.

“But once the door is open, it is open to the other side as well, and the forces of darkness will come quickly looking for their way in, so you will have to act quickly, m’lord. Look for the warlock in the woods on the nights when there is no moon; but, beware, for he too will have a price.”

Just then a woman slipped through the entryway from the hut behind the wood-framed canvas stall and glanced at the old woman and the baron. The woman saw the odd expression on the baron’s face, a confused composition of disbelief, shock and muted outrage.

“Mother, back inside the house,” the woman barked, staring at the old woman until she slowly rose from the stool and shuffled into the shadows of the hut beyond. The woman turned to Hoth and smiled apologetically. “Pay her no mind, m’lord; she’s an old woman who daydreams out loud.”

Hoth had nodded, turned and worked his way back through the village to where his man-servant stood with the horses. He turned and looked back down the main street, at the filth and muck and ramshackle houses. At the far end was the town’s church, the only stone structure, and his eyes traced the architecture up the tower to the top, and the cross that glinted in the morning sun.

As Onorien told the story, Arris could almost see it in his mind’s eye, as if he were watching a movie-in-a-movie, a translucent overlay of the story of Baron von Hoth hovering in the air between him and Onorien, in sepia. It wasn’t so much a story told with words as it was a window on the past, a trance induced by Onorien with his words, allowing Arris to see the memories of another person as if they were a documentary film. Onorien paused and Arris broke out his reverie, the moving images in his mind fading and the room emerging from soft focus. Arris concentrated on Onorien for a moment, trying to shake the sensation of having awoken from an afternoon nap, his mind drifting with the after-thoughts of a half-remembered dream. Onorien smiled slightly.

“Baron Ewald von Hoth feared a demon had been summoned to murder him and abduct his wife. The demon wanted the girl because by killing and eating her, it would consume her divine ability and become stronger,” Onorien said. “The baron vowed to protect his wife, but there was nothing he could do, because non-Divine weapons have no effect on demons. So, he prayed often for God to intervene, eventually seeking out a druid who lived in a nearby wood. And, then, one night a meteorite landed on the grounds of his estate, and he took this as a sign from God that the ore in the fallen stone could be forged into a blade that could smite the demon.

“With the help of the druid, he found a blacksmith with alchemical powers who was able to turn the metal into a Divine Instrument, a sword capable of slaying more than merely the creatures born of the earth,” Onorien said, stepping past Arris and running his eyes along the length of the black blade. “The baron intended to fight and kill the demon with the sword, and, as the legend goes, march into hell and kill Satan.

“But it was not to be. The baron was found one morning shortly after the sword was delivered, burned on an upside-down cross, the sword and his wife missing. Nobody saw anything. Nobody ever knew what happened.”

Arris stood in the room in silence, his eyes lingering on the sword for a moment before he turned his attention to Onorien.

“Demons eat people?” Arris asked, incredulous.

“So the legend goes.”

“I thought they just poked you with one of those three-pointed spears while you waded around in the burning-hot molten lava or whatever it is.”

“Brimstone.”

“Right, brimstone.”

Just then, Nereika walked into the room and stood silently inside the far doorway. She glanced at both men for a moment, and then settled on Onorien.

“M- … Doctor, we’re ready, now,” Nereika said.

Onorien nodded and turned to Arris. “Feel free to indulge with the liquor cabinet and cigars in my study, Mr. Arris, and enjoy the rest of your evening. I must go and attend to another matter.”

With that, Onorien walked across the room and past Nereika, who stared a moment longer at Arris, her face an uncertain mix of emotions, before she pivoted and followed Onorien. Arris watched them walk down the hallway until they turned a corner, and then stared around the room, again surveying the array of weaponry and artifacts on display.

“Okay, so it is an all-inclusive resort,” Arris said softly, “just one without a tub with spare swim trunks.”

Chapter 25

Gregoire cut the motor to the boat and let the bow sink into the water, the craft gently bobbing after it stopped. The GPS system showed nothing, just a small red arrow on a screen devoid of fixed points, a line of text across the bottom of the readout telling him that the unit had lost satellite contact. The gyro compass spun aimlessly, momentarily fixing on a point before twisting clockwise or counter-clockwise in search of a fix. He shook his head and then tapped the top of the compass unit with his pointer finger, already certain it would do nothing to correct the compass.

“Really? I’m in the middle of nowhere?” he said softly.

He looked out at the sea and saw nothing but horizon. He pulled the map off the dash, flipped on the red-beam flashlight, and tried to pinpoint his location on the map as best he could given the time and direction he had been traveling. There was no way to know, exactly, without instrumentation. He pulled out a lensatic compass from his kit bag and unfolded it. The pointer stuck for a moment as he leveled it, and then spun slowly counter-clockwise, pausing for a moment before reversing its spin.

He turned his attention to the night sky, located the North Star and twisted the map to orient it. It wasn’t much help, but it was something. There was nothing on the map to head to.

Gregoire drummed his fingers on the dash, dropped the map on the seat and looked out over the water. “Middle of nowhere and nowhere to go.”

Gregoire suddenly grew still. On the horizon, a fog bank was rolling parallel to his course, rising up and curling into the air a few miles off his starboard side. This was impossible. Gregoire rooted around the cockpit of the boat and found the binoculars. He stared through them, adjusting the focus, marveling at the low cloud, watching it move across the sea as if propelled by a strong wind. And then the image of the sloop broke the horizon and silhouetted against the fog bank, its sails fully-rigged and swollen with wind despite being tattered and riddled with rents and holes. Gregoire looked above the binoculars, stared at the shape on the horizon without aid for a moment, made sure his eyes were seeing what his mind told him he was seeing. He looked back through the glasses at the shape of the boat, almost certain he could make out the mottled camouflage pattern on the hull, his mind’s eye telling him this had to be the same boat as the one he’d seen earlier in the day, anchored at the small island from which he’d escaped.

The thought filled him with a sense of urgency, and he began quickly scanning the rest of the sea for signs of the other ship. Nothing. Just a ghostly ship plowing across the surface of the sea at full sail in a bank of fog. He watched for a few moments more as the sloop began pulling away, moving at a speed Gregoire thought too fast for a sailing vessel of such size and age. When it began to disappear over the far horizon in front of him, he turned the ignition on and started the engines. He glanced at the GPS navigation system and the gyro compass, noted neither was working, and then wondered if there was a connection to the sloop. Then the thought struck him: The Bermuda Triangle.

He dropped the binoculars onto the seat and pushed the throttle forward, the boat rising up on the water.

“Somebody knows where they’re going,” Gregoire said, turning the wheel to follow the sloop.

Chapter 26

The descendents of the crew of the Dutch sailing ship Mariabelle crouched in silence in the jungle, all of them staring at the mansion, all of them filled with dread. Willem’s stomach was an empty pit in him, hollowed out with fear. His fingers, slick with sweat, wrapped around his spear. Thijmen knelt alongside him, holding one of the few remaining serviceable cutlasses, a blade used for slicing heads off large fish and cutting coconuts, not opening a man’s body.

Pieter crept through the underbrush and stopped, putting his hand on Thijmen’s shoulder. “Tonight is the night. He won’t be expecting it.”

Thijmen looked into Pieter’s face, saw the grim determination in the straight line of Pieter’s mouth, and doubted.

“He will be expecting it after what you did to Nereika and the stranger on the beach yesterday,” Thijmen said. “We should never have let you try it.”

“The Sparkle Spell? It’s just a cantrip, it’s next-to-harmless,” Pieter said. “He’ll figure we were just trying to capture the stranger. He’ll never think we’re coming.”

“But he took Dedrick,” Thijmen said, turning his attention back to the mansion. “That must mean something is going on.”

“It does,” Pieter said. “It means we must get Dedrick back. We can’t let the white-haired man just pluck us from our homes, steal us from the jungle, make us disappear. This has gone on too long, Thijmen. We must make a stand. We cannot just live here on this island in constant fear of when he will take another one of us.”

Pieter squeezed Thijmen’s shoulder. “It is better to die trying to free ourselves than to continue to live like this, knowing our children or grandchildren might someday be taken by him.”

Thijmen nodded. “What about the stranger?”

Pieter let loose of Thijmen’s shoulder and twisted his spear in his hands. “If he gets in the way, we kill him. We know nothing of him; he may be with the white-haired man.”

“And Nereika?” Thijmen asked. “She will fight for him.”

The two stared at each other for a moment.

“Yes, she will,” Pieter said softly.

“Do we kill her, too?”

“If we must,” Pieter said. “But she didn’t kill us yesterday, and she could have.”

“Do you think she understood?”

“She didn’t kill us.”

They were quiet for another moment, each regarding the other. The Sparkle Spell was one of two cantrips passed down from the elders, a simple incantation much like The Red Lights that, when spoken, could create a brief sensation of the essence of the words. They were just simple tricks nobody knew the origin of, magic acts done for the children, a simple thread in the fabric of life to which nobody had ever given much thought, two simple tricks that a handful of people in the crew could perform, and Pieter was one of them. As had been Nereika, before she had been taken.

For a while, now, The Sparkle Spell was supposed to be the warning, the sign that the rest of the crew was coming. But Nereika had fought back on the beach, fought against them instead of joining them and returning to camp. And the younger white man had been almost dazed and confused by what happened, crouching over on the beach and covering his head as the air had erupted with harmless sparkles of light.

At that moment Pieter had wished The Sparkle Spell could do some damage, cause some harm, because it so evidently discombobulated the new white man. Add a little pain to it, and it could work wonders, Pieter had thought in the moment before he realized Nereika was almost upon him, red-tinted tendrils of lightning snaking through the underbrush, looking for him and the others with him. Whatever the white-haired man had done to her, he had done it completely; she was no longer one of the crew.

And then in the near-panic to escape Nereika and remain hidden from the new white man, Dedrick had disappeared into the jungle in the direction of the mansion and become captured by the white-haired man. A stupid mistake and now another one of them was gone, dressed in the uniform of the mansion.

Captain Aald crept up to Thijmen and Pieter, his hand gripping a rapier more accustomed to gutting fish than men. Aald surveyed the leaders of the two landing parties quietly, searching their eyes for any last minute doubts. He saw nothing but grim determination in both of the young men.

“Okay, so we go in through the main door and The Dead Calm,” Aald said. “We don’t know anything about how it looks inside, but we know it’s got to be big, filled with hallways and rooms. The women will go in right behind us and act as guides, standing in the hallways and providing us with directions to where we’ve come from and where others have gone.

“We’ll go in quiet if we can, but if we have to, we break through whatever doors and windows we need to. Move quickly once you’re in; kill the white-haired man, find Nereika and Dedrick, and then we meet back on the main beach. Let’s get going.”

Aald nodded to Pieter and disappeared into the darkness of the jungle, the soft sound of other footfalls joining his as Pieter’s party moved off with the captain. Pieter looked at Willem, tried to give him an uplifting smile, to boost the man’s flagging spirits, and then turned and patted Thijmen’s shoulder with the palm of his hand.

“I’ll see you on the inside, Thijmen, and when I do, we shall be free men,” Pieter said, turning and taking up the trail position on his landing party as it snaked through the underbrush toward the edge of the yard near The Dead Calm.

Thijmen turned and stared at the main door, a hundred yards away, across perfectly manicured grass, fringed by perfectly trimmed shrubbery. Right there, just a few dozen yards on the other side of the bushes behind which he now knelt, had been the spot where Geert had transformed from life to ash, dust blown on the wind. How? And, yet, it had been so, become an irreversible fact of life, something nobody could understand.

Thijmen turned to the eight men who were his landing party, each armed with a spear. “When the captain sends up the purple smoke, it’s time to go.”

Every man turned his eyes to the section of jungle near where Pieter and Captain Aald would soon be emerging, signaling the beginning of the raid.

Chapter 27

The Killjoy cut through the water with ease, its sails full of wind and a thick fog billowing off into the air from around its waterline. Captain Pike Chelingham smiled to himself as he let the night air rush through his clothing, ruffling his calico overcoat. He turned his head up and looked at the full moon glowing brightly, the sky almost empty of clouds and full of stars. If he tilted his head just right, he would lose sight of the Killjoy in his peripheral vision, and it was as if he were floating in the void, the dark sea an infinity to match that of the vacuum of space.

He could hear Sharktooth clucking out laughs from the bow, excited little hiccups of happiness that grew in intensity as the ship brought them closer to the hidden wizard. For almost two-hundred years Pike and his crew had been searching for the thief Konrad Onorien, sailing to every far flung port-of-call on the edge of the globe looking for a hint of a clue as to what had become of the conniving wizard. And here he was, hiding in the muddle of The Devil’s Triangle’s magics, using the swirling forces of one of the world’s innately supernatural spots to mask his location.

But the stone in Sharktooth’s hands showed the way to Onorien’s lair, and it glowed intensely, the locator ball on it a constantly repeating a collapsing ring of concentric circles homing in on the spot where The Left Eye lay. The rings had quickly run through the colors of the rainbow, starting at red and shifting through orange and yellow until reaching indigo, certain proof that the Killjoy was closing in. The rings would turn violet when they were finally close enough to retrieve it.

Portnoy Witherspoon clattered up behind him, the hard soles of his feet clicking on the deck as he made his way. Chelingham would’ve smiled at the lack of stealth, if he could still smile. He turned his head and cocked it to the side.

“Well, Port, we’re closing in on the bastard. Soon, we’ll have it back,” Pike said.

“I can’t believe he been hidin’ in here the whole time,” Portnoy said. “We been through here scores o’ times.”

Pike patted the railing with the palm of his hand as if comforting the ship. “Port, you know well as me that there ain’t no understandin’ the magics or how theys work. The Devil’s Triangle is a confusin’ place even for those who can’t be swallowed up by it. Who knows what a power such as a wizard can do with it, hiding himself in the creases of the Demon Winds.”

“I ain’t never bothered to ask ‘cause I ain’t never bothered to think we might be about to fix him in our sites,” Portnoy said. “But jus’ how you goin’ to get the ol’ wiz to return our property? It ain’t likely he’s just goin’ to hand it over no muss, no fuss.”

“Why Port, I thought that was plain obvious as the nose used to be on yer face,” Pike roared with laughter. “He’ll give it back once he re’lizes who we is and knows the curse ain’t jus’ fer us, but can be made over to any man who claims to own the crystal.”

Sharktooth clicked across the deck and slipped between Pike and Portnoy, turning his head from one to the other. “Oh, I hope he resists, I do,” Sharktooth said, “He won’t know what hit him until it’s too late, and then I’ll just rip him apart at the joints. A couple of his bones sewn into me and I’ll have a measure of the wizard’s power unlike any other of our kind. And then who can stand in our way?”

Chapter 28

Arris walked through the doors from Onorien’s study with a glass of Scotch in his hand and stopped at the railing. The jungle was quiet, again. Too quiet, Arris thought, as he set the glass down on the railing. Quiet in the sense that the wildlife had gone to ground, a lack of noise created by the movement of men through it. He knew the sound well.

He cocked his head to the side and listened. There was no distant hum of last-minute trucks dropping soldiers off in the night, no errant click of a bolt being pulled into position, no roll of a Zippo lighter by a trooper breaking noise and light discipline to huff one last cigarette in the bottom of a foxhole before artillery softened up the position.

Arris had no idea who would be out there, although the only known candidates would be the primitives living in the shacks down by the beach on the other side of the island. Why they would be planning an assault on the mansion was anyone’s guess, although he suddenly wasn’t ruling it out given the strange ambush on the beach the other morning. For a moment, he wondered if it were he the natives might be after, but Arris ruled that out after a moment’s reflection: he was too new to the island to warrant any specific attention from them.

But, then, neither Onorien nor Nereika seemed to merit any cause for concern, so far as Arris could tell. The middle-aged man and his young assistant were little more than bookworms and collectors of antiquities, and neither activity seemed to Arris enough to pique the interests of fishermen. What would they do with any of the items Onorien had shown Arris thus far? Burn the books for fuel? Use the battle axes to crack open coconuts? Live in the mansion? None of it made any sense.

Arris walked back into the mansion and through the study, turning out of the room and into the hallway. He walked through several intersections, checking each one for sounds from distant rooms, and heard nothing. The mansion was empty. He poked his head into several rooms and saw nothing, just sitting rooms, dining rooms, display rooms and guest bedrooms. After a while, he was sure he had to be walking down the same hallways from different directions and he was unable to figure out why he couldn’t get the layout of the mansion down in his mind. There was no way he could be moving through the mansion the way he was and constantly coming to the same intersection, so he popped into a sitting room and rooted around for something to mark the hallways and doors with, or maybe a paper and pen to map out the floor plan. Nothing.

“I’m in a goddamned Escher print,” Arris said as he stared through the window of the room at the wide lawn outside.

Arris picked up a book from a small side table next to a davenport in the room and ripped a half-dozen pages from it, tearing each page into strips. As he closed the door to the room, he slipped a strip into the frame and pulled the door tightly shut. It held the paper. Arris almost allowed himself to smile, but an inner sense of caution and urgency tamped down that reaction, forcing him into reality, reinforcing the potential danger of the situation. Concentrate, he thought. Something was wrong with the pattern he had been trying to discern, and that alone told him things were seriously wrong, and extremely dangerous. He walked to the end of the hallway, pulled another door open, and slipped a strip of paper into it, closing it securely afterward. One passageway was now cleared.

He bent down and touched the pistol on his ankle through his clothing, thought better of it, and frowned. No need to reveal he was armed; better to remain unsuspecting as long as possible. He turned the corner and made his way down another corridor, slowly opening doors and slipping strips of paper into them, staying light on the balls of his feet, listening for sounds of people moving. Nothing. Silence.

As he marked the rooms, he started noticing slight differences in them, mostly in color or furniture placement. None of them seemed to be used with any frequency, judging from the layer of dust on the surfaces of any given room. And all of them seemed to have a window that faced the front lawn, a fact that confused Arris each time he looked out a window that he knew should face into the side of the mountain.

He made his way down another corridor in much the same way, marking doors with slips of paper until he noticed the top of a stairway at the end of one, evidenced by a railing on the side of the wall. He tip-toed up to it and cocked an ear toward it, listening for footfalls or the tell-tale silence of someone breathing lightly, lying in wait, trying to remain hidden until the last moment. Arris closed his eyes for a moment and listened harder, shutting out the light ringing in his ears and the soft thump of blood through his veins, searching through the stillness for anything alive.

He opened his eyes and began down the steps, creeping slowly, looking for shadows that should not be. At the bottom of the stairs he emerged into a kitchen, pristine in appearance, unused in condition. He paused and searched through it with his eyes. Not a single sign of use. No food stains, no grease near the stove, no grooves in the wooden cutting block surfaces. He stepped to the refrigerator and pulled it open: empty save for cold air. He froze in place. He roved his eyes quickly through the kitchen area, again looking for someone lying in wait, and then stared back into the empty, silent appliance.

He now knew deep in the pit of his being that something was dreadfully wrong, though his mind had difficulty aligning the various facts with a reality that made any sense. He was in a mansion on an island in the Caribbean that had all the conveniences of modern life – electricity, running water, and refrigeration - and he had yet to encounter a light switch or wall outlet. There were no phones, no televisions, no radios, and no computers. None of the basic necessities of living in the modern world were in evidence, and, yet, the mansion and its owner acted as if these services existed or were irrelevant.

Arris paused and shut the door to the refrigerator, once again listening to the background sounds. He saw a butcher block of knives on a nearby counter, walked over to it and pulled out the chef’s knife, turning it in his hand and checking it for balance. He flipped it in the air once, quickly, and caught it by the handle, feeling it set firmly in his palm. He could tell it was handmade, forged by a person, not stamped out in a mill, the tang of the blade extending through the grip, the balance perfect. He ran his finger over the blade edge: razor sharp.

He kept the knife and made his way back up the staircase into the main hall it emptied into. He looked down each corridor and saw strips of paper from the doors in both directions, aligned himself with the hallway he remembered as the primary one, and walked down it, turned and made his way back to Onorien’s study. Arris retrieved his glass of Scotch from the railing on the veranda and took a deep sip from it, letting the peaty malt wash over his tongue and sting the back of his throat, a small taste of the consistency of his reality returning with the swallow. Something, at least, was the same.

He set the knife down and perused the spines of books the on the shelves, wondering at the bizarre titles. Though he had never actually looked for any such books, he was fairly certain you couldn’t find them at the local chain mega bookstore near his house. Alchemical Infusions In Metallurgy read the one Arris pulled from the shelf, opening it to a random page and staring at a diagram, Latin words written below. He didn’t read Latin and pushed the book back into the empty slot on the shelf. As he side-stepped down the length of the shelf, browsing more titles and sipping his glass of whisky, a weird sense of foreboding nestled in the tips of his fingers and scalp.

He pulled another book from a shelf, opened it to the first page, and read aloud, softly: “It is the faith of the caster that determines the outcome of the spell, its power, its intensity. It is faith in the mystical that is required for the mystical to become real. To cast a spell, the caster must know that will be cast, know that there is no other possibility, and know that there has never been anything other than the certainty of the spell as real for the spell to be real.

“It is faith in the power of man’s will over nature that gives man entry into the power of The Divine World, and gives him dominion over all life. Without faith, man is but an animal subject to the laws of nature; with faith, man remakes the laws of nature.”

Arris put the book back and rolled his eyes around the room, checking to see if Onorien had silently entered behind him, again. He took a few more steps to his side and pulled another book from the shelf. There was an almost silent click, barely audible, a noise that might have been unnoticeable were the world not quite so quiet as it had become. Then there was a brief zephyr, a draft of musty, salty air that whispered past his face. Arris turned his head and stared in utter disbelief at the now-opened bookshelf to his right, revealing a secret passage behind it.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

Chapter 29

Gregoire had been following the sloop for almost two hours as it cut through the sea, a dark silhouette enshrouded in fog on the horizon, a sight that no man should be capable of seeing. And, yet, there it was, cutting effortlessly through the Caribbean under the moonlit sky. The crew hadn’t noticed him, or, if any aboard had, they hadn’t deemed him to be worthy of action. The sloop had kept on its course steadfastly, as if drawn to a purpose. Gregoire was merely hoping those on the sloop knew where they were going so that he could find a reference point on his map that made some sense.

And then a pyramid of shadow had begun to rise from the ocean on the horizon. On his map, there was no island nearby, only water, but before his eyes there was an island with a small mountain towering up into the sky. Gregoire noted the time on his watch, estimated a direction based on Polaris, and drew an X on his map.

He cut the engines to his boat and drifted for a moment, watching as the shadow of the sloop finally slipped over the horizon, turning at the last moment into the island. He pulled the binoculars up to his eyes and looked through them at the island. Nothing but darkness. He glanced down at the GPS display, then at the gyro compass, and noted that neither was providing any kind of guidance, the compass needle just lazily circling and reversing. Then he noticed the water was still, flat, a glass surface reflecting the moonlight. No wind blew, either. The world was dead calm: doldrums.

How had the sloop made it in through here without wind? He was sure its sails had been full, puffed out as if receiving a hearty gale, but the air around him wouldn’t have caused the smoke from an extinguished match to waver.

Gregoire picked up the satellite phone and dialed. He watched as the display went blank after a minute, not connecting to the outside world. He pressed in the numbers again, watched the phone try to dial out, and then nothing. He dropped it on the seat next to the binoculars, restarted the engines and turned the boat directly into the island. He closed the distance with the shoreline quickly, noticing as he did so a pier jutting out into the surf. He slowed the engines to a putter and turned on the boat’s searchlight, sweeping it across the bow and onto the shore. He saw a couple of row boats beached on the sand, and a slightly larger sailboat moored to the wooden pier.

He brought his boat alongside the wooden structure and looked at it in the light of the beam. It was a handcrafted, rickety structure lashed together with homemade rope. It looked like a strong wave or a mild storm would wash it away in an instant, but he tied his boat to it anyway, winding his line around a cleat made from a carved piece of wood. He zipped open the canvas bag lying on the floor of the boat and pulled out a P-90 machine gun, slapped a magazine into it, and checked the muzzle flashlight. He fished an extra magazine from the bag, slipped it into the back pocket of his pants, and stepped back onto the pier, easing his weight onto each leg as he made his way toward the shore. He kept the muzzle light off, searching through the shadows with his natural night vision for any evidence of life.

He paused when he reached the sand at the end of the pier, listening intently through the sound of the wind brushing through the nearby trees, ignoring the incessant crash of waves, trying to make out a sound not of nature.  Gregoire crept past the beached row boats and found a worn path through the trees. He slowed, readied his weapon and trod down it, taking careful, slow steps, his eyes roving through the night, his ears alert. The path was evidence of people, and it was worn through frequent, and current, use. Someone had been here recently.

A short distance through the trees, the path opened up into a clearing, the irregular lines of make-shift shanty roofs drawing nearly-straight horizontal lines through the darkness. Gregoire had seen this type of village a thousand times before in Africa, small square huts constructed out of random materials, just large enough to lie down in at night and keep most of the rain out. Home, once. He didn’t miss it.

Gregoire made his way around the first shack slowly, setting each foot down cautiously, testing the ground for anything that might give way or make a sound. He smelled the trace scent of a campfire, the smoldering of wood trailing faint smoke tendrils into the air. He froze and listened again, the silhouette village coming into greater relief the more his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the jungle. Whoever had been here was gone, but not for long. Strange, though, that there were no women, no children, no elderly left behind to tend the fire or monitor the village. Everyone had gone wherever anyone had gone and had left everything behind. Gregoire didn’t know what that meant, but given the pleasant night weather, he knew that it was evidence of something amiss, something wrong.

He turned on the muzzle flashlight and swept the beam through the camp. There was no evidence of distress, no indications of a mass evacuation or a sudden need by the inhabitants to flee. Everything was where it should be, so far as he could tell. Gregoire moved to the entrance of one of the huts and pushed through the make-shift door, shining the light into the small structure. There was a dirt floor, a mattress made of natural materials and a random assortment of storage containers made from clay. Nothing of value to anyone other than the person who normally lived in the shack; garden-variety poverty of the type he’d seen the world over, the universal constant of mankind.

Gregoire noticed a small chest in the corner of the room, a well-worn, old and decrepit wooden box with brass fittings. He shined the light on it, the first evidence so far of an advanced civilization. It was old, but had been made with tools by a craftsman. He bent down to it and opened it. He smiled. Inside were a couple of dozen coins of different denominations, none of them known to him, and a variety of sea shells, smooth pebbles, a key ring with a few rusty keys and a boson’s whistle. Gregoire ran his fingers through the contents, turning them over, looking for anything that might give a better clue as to the owner or the inhabitants of the village, but found only more of the same.

He turned off the flashlight and stood up, letting his eyes re-adjust to the night. He exited the hut and stood in the clearing, noticing the odd chair near the smoldering campfire, evidence of some tribal culture’s chief. Who were these people? How were they living such a primitive life in the middle of the Caribbean, smack-dab in the middle of the sea lanes, beneath air routes to exotic beach destinations?

He took another long look around the village, felt the weight of the weapon in his hands, and made his way past the campfire remnants, easily finding a path on the opposite side of the village, leading into the jungle. He listened, again, and pressed on.

Chapter 30

Arris inched down the secret corridor, the kitchen knife held firmly in his right hand, his left hand raised before him, searching out unseen outcrops. It was a rough-hewn tunnel through rock, chiseled without care of right angles, thick wooden support beams reinforcing the ceiling every half-dozen feet. There were small glowing stones set into the walls in-between the supports, marble-sized dots pressed into the walls and giving just enough illumination to reveal the general size and shape of the tunnel, but not enough to light it in any useful way. Arris had no idea what they were or how they worked, and hadn’t paused for too long to try to figure it out. They just were, and like everything about the mansion, they didn’t make total sense: most people would have strung lights from the ceiling.

There was a shriek. It reverberated down the corridor and froze Arris in place, a wail of pain and torture. Arris had heard the sound before, dozens of times. It was a common sound in cinderblock structures built on lonely parcels of land in hot dusty climes, cold arid hideaways and anywhere men had hold of other men with whom they disagreed. There was no mercy in such places, and Arris had long ago learned to turn his emotions off at the sound of a plea for leniency, a call for human decency, a gasp for a moment calm. There was no limit to the amount of pain a man could deal to another man under such a circumstance, and no call for there to be a reason for it. Arris had learned to accept it as just a fact of life, and had mentally readied himself for the inevitable moment he would find himself handcuffed to an office chair under a bare bulb in a shadowy cement room.

He paused and held his breath, ignored the rush of blood in his ears and cocked his head down the hall. There it was, the murmuring of voices in between takes. The calm, reassured monotone of the man in charge mixed with the gasping, pitchy desperation of the subject. Arris was not there to save whoever it was, although as he crept closer, he knew someone needed to be saved.

There was a howl of pain similar to the previous one, only louder and brought more into relief now that Arris was closer to it. Just before the yelp, there had been a crackling sound and brief flashes of red light illuminating the far end of the corridor. Arris gripped the knife tightly, once again reassuring himself of its substance.

The murmuring grew more distinct, and he could make out what sounded to be more of an instruction than an interrogation. A lesson? Whoever the subject was seemed to be pleading randomly, the sounds of his words warbling down the corridor in desperation, as he were hoping somebody, anybody would listen to reason. An appeal to sympathy, Arris thought.

Arris neared the end of the corridor and found a short, curving length of stairs cut from the rock descending to a wider opening into a chamber he could not see. He paused at the top and listened.

“You see, Nereika, you must have the faith that you can do it,” Onorien said from somewhere unseen down below, his voice patient and soft. “You must clear your mind of all doubt, of all hesitation, and simply believe. This is the way and the path, child, and to walk it requires only knowing that it is there.

“Try again.”

There was a murmured word followed by a hissing crackle mixed with a flash of red light, then a short cry of pain that quickly devolved into the heavy breathing of disbelief. Arris inched forward and slid to the other side of the hallway, stealing himself in the shadow cast along the opposite wall. He pressed against the stone wall with his back and slowly moved his feet down the steps, trying to find a line-of-sight into the chamber.

After a few steps, he saw a man chained to a wall, the light-skinned black man from earlier that day, his arms slack, the chains taught, his body weight resting on the couplings around his wrists. His body was slick with sweat and blood trickled from his wrists where the irons bit into skin. Arris stopped and tried to merge into the shadow, to become invisible, and watched the man chained against the wall, the man’s eyes staring disbelievingly in a direction where Arris assumed Onorien and Nereika were standing. The man’s breathing was shallow, a mixture of ignoring pain and incomprehension at his current circumstance. Not long ago this man – this boy - had lived a normal life, eaten meals with family, laughed with friends, and splashed in the surf; now, there was only pain and torment, the grim reality of being chained to a wall in a basement.

“You see, Nereika, you can do it,” Onorien said, “all you need is faith.

“Again, please.”

The man in the chains grew taut and stared straight ahead, his eyes closing to slits and his jaw tightening, anticipating. There was a long pause and Arris thought he heard the slightest shuffle of feet on the floor, a word was spoken – “electric?” – and a red tendril of light suddenly burst into existence in a horizontal line, extending from the mid-section of the man’s body to some uncertain point in the chamber which Arris could not see. The man tensed up and jerked for a moment, every muscle in his body contracted, a shout of pain involuntarily erupting from his lips. Then he collapsed against the chains.

“Good, Nereika,” Onorien said.

Arris wasn’t sure what he had just seen, and he had just witnessed it. He took another step down the stairs and turned his head slightly … and was momentarily astonished at what he saw. There, a dozen feet away from him, in an intricately and colorfully painted domed chamber, stood Onorien and Nereika, she in a red robe and Onorien’s garments defying description. He was wearing a robe, but as he shifted the weight on his feet, the colors of the robe shuffled through the colors of the rainbow, as if he were wearing some sort of color-reflecting raiment. Arris shifted his eyes back to Nereika and saw that her robe shimmered slightly, too, as if powered by some electrical current or imbued with reflective threads.

The chamber itself was perfectly round on the floor where the two stood, the walls were painted in yellow and blue geometric designs that interlocked and gave the perception the room was rotating on an axis. They were carved with perfection from the rock of the mountain, rising up to form a perfect point at the top of the room, the shape of a cylinder or a bullet, which was capped with an inlay of highly polished gold. There were glyphs of all sorts painted onto the walls at eye-level, gold and silver diagrams which shimmered with an ethereal, almost sepulchral glow. Arris turned his attention back to Onorien, who seemed almost bored with what he was doing, an instructor teaching a lazy student a lesson the student should have learned long ago.

Onorien held a small crystal in his hand, turning it slowly, a translucent piece of rock the size of a tennis ball but cut with facets like a diamond engagement ring. It cast out glints of different colors as Onorien absently turned it in the palm of his hand.

“Please, help me.”

The words were spoken softly, almost whispered into Arris’ ear, and he turned his head back to the man on the wall, whose eyes were now fixed directly on Arris. For a moment, Arris stared back into the man’s eyes, not immediately processing the fact that the man on the wall had found Arris in the shadow and was imploring him for aid. But Arris’ senses quickly returned, the weight of the knife in his hand alerting him to action, and Arris turned his attention back quickly on the team of Onorien and Nereika, who had now just found Arris in the darkness of the stairwell.

“Mr. Arris,” Onorien said calmly, “I was hoping to wait another day or so for your trials. It’s so rare to get a man of the modern world as a subject. But serendipity is what it is.”

This made no sense to Arris, but his instincts were already kicking in, flooding adrenalin through his body, heightening his senses, preparing him for action. And then he watched as Onorien gently shoved Nereika to the side, stepped to the center of the room, and pointed his right fist at the man on the wall.

“Exuro!” Onorien said in a commanding tone.

A violet fireball the size of a beach ball suddenly blinked into existence and raced across the length of the chamber, swallowing the man on the wall in a burst of multi-colored flames, the man’s high pitched shriek quickly extinguished as the flash of fire died out, revealing a crumbling pile of ash and bone fragments against the wall. Where there had been a man a moment before, there was nothing but a dark smudge on the wall, the remnants of a campfire at the base, the chains swinging slightly as they ebbed to a stop.

And Arris was running. His mind raced, trying to process what he had just seen, to make it fit into the natural order of things. Just moments ago, there had been a man in chains against a wall, and in an instant, that man had been turned into a pile of ash by a man pointing a fist at him. Impossible, and, yet, Arris had watched it happen. Arris had seen a lot of men die over the years, in a lot of improbable or unusual ways, but never had he witnessed the instantaneous destruction of a human being with the utterance of a mere word.

The lights on the side of the corridor whipped by quickly, the light of the open bookshelf growing brighter as Arris sprinted toward it. Already, his mind was working through the maze of rooms and corridors inside the mansion through which he would have to race to make his way to the outside, to the safety of the jungle, where he would have a chance of escape and evasion. He knew the natural world, the world of dirt and plants, cover and concealment. He was dead meat if he remained inside the mansion.

He skidded and juked the hard ninety-degree turn through the open bookshelf, turning his head only for the slightest second down the corridor to see the onrushing silhouette of the girl, her robe puffing out with her exertion to catch up. He stepped into the room and was for a moment directionless, the position of the doors not immediately remembered by him, and he took several hesitant steps into the middle of the room to get his bearings as his eyes sought out the exits. Nereika’s steps suddenly grew firm against the corridor floor, rising in pitch as she approached. Arris turned, the heft of the knife reappearing in his hand, assuring him of an option.

Nereika burst into the frame of the open bookshelf and quickly assumed a fighting posture. Arris stared at her for a microsecond before his instincts made his legs continue to move, sidestepping through the room toward the nearest door.

“Exuro!” Nereika said as she pointed her fist toward Arris, a small, ping-pong ball of flame burst into the air in front of her fingers and jetted from her knuckles across the room, past Arris’ shoulder and crashed into the wall behind him with a puff.

With a fluid movement Arris raised the knife and spun it through the air toward the girl, the knife turning into a silvery disk around its center of gravity. But the girl was quick and stepped behind the wedge of the bookshelf, moving it just enough for the knife blade to bury itself into the spine of a book.

Arris dashed out the doorway into the hallway and turned down it, rushing past rooms and the side tables and barely noticing the sculptures and knick knacks that had earlier interested him. His mind raced as he looked for the slips of paper he had left in the frames of the doorways, but they were of little help. He turned around corners and through similar hallways, paper slips or not. This was impossible. There was no way he could be constantly going down the same hallways; the mansion was big, but not that big. And each time he stopped to gain his bearings, he could hear the faint sound of Nereika’s footsteps rising through the silence

He turned another corner and found himself in the foyer, the large wooden door opposite him, the curling staircase rising to the second floor. That didn’t make sense, either, as he was sure he had just been on the upper floor. He hadn’t gone down any stairs in the mansion, just those in the corridor behind Onorien’s study, and that room, Arris was certain, was upstairs. Not that it mattered, as the door to the outside world was right in front of him.

He crossed to it and pulled it open.

“Nuts.”

Moving quickly across the lawn was a stream of people, the natives from the village, armed with spears and machetes. Arris stared at them in disbelief, his situation now markedly worse as his escape was now cut off. What the hell were they up to? Why, of all the days in all the years they had lived in the village, had they chosen this night to raid the mansion?

One of the natives near the head of the line suddenly pointed at Arris, the rest of them reacting by quickly readying their weapons and fanning out. The man at the head of the line raised his sword, what looked to Arris to be a cutlass of some maritime vintage, and dropped it to point at the spot in which Arris was standing. Arris took a step back and slammed the door closed. He turned and surveyed the foyer just in time to see Nereika assume stance in a nearby hallway, clench her fist and point it at him.

“Exuro!”

Arris had already started moving before the small ball of fire whizzed by him and slammed into the door behind him, charring a small circle in it. He was bounding up the stairs three at a time, a red dash of Nereika in her robe whirring by in his peripheral vision, coming after him. He made the top of the stairs and turned down the nearest hallway, once again his mind searched for a distinct memory pattern of the layout of the building and came up blank. The hallway looked just like any of the others, the end tables and their displays insignificantly different than any he had seen elsewhere.

Down the hall a few dozen more feet he came to an open door and turned into it, rushing to the middle and pausing when he realized he was in Onorien’s trophy room, the medieval weaponry and other assorted artifacts surrounding him. For a moment, he almost reached for a small dagger on a display stand before him, but then he remembered the pistol on his ankle, a small wave of admonishment washing through him at having forgotten he was armed, and he bent down to it. He pulled his pant leg up, snapped open the Velcro hold and grasped the butt of his Kahr P380 as he stood up in one fluid motion, raising the weapon to readiness.

He saw Nereika standing twenty feet in front of him, her arms outstretched toward him, palms raised, her red robe shimmering in the dim light of the room, fractions of a second ahead of his movements.

“Electricus!” she said.

A pair of thin lines of red lights suddenly blinked into existence, connecting the distance between her palms and Arris’ torso. His body tensed with convulsions and pain. His eyes singed in their sockets, losing focus on the world; his ears rang and his lips quivered. Throughout the length of his body, Arris could feel every muscle engaged, taut and filled with heat. He could not move. It felt like a Tazer, only more forceful and painful, but it was not unendurable, and he managed to keep his mental focus through the pain, his eyes focused on the red blur that was the girl before him.

And then it stopped. Relief flooded his body but one thought dominated every cell in his brain, one reaction filled every nerve ending in his body, every fiber in every muscle, an instinct honed over two decades. Shoot.

His arm finished the swing up to his waist, the pistol pointed at the space in the room where Nereika stood, and his finger drew steadily in, a firm controlled motion bringing the trigger back. An instant later, the girl crumpled and twisted backward, a small explosion of blood from her abdomen mixed with a look of shock and pain on her face. Arris had seen the reaction dozens of times before and turned away as he heard the girl’s body make a dull thud on the ground.

He ran to the door and pulled it, suddenly astonished that it would not open. He tried again, yanking and then pushing on the handle. Nothing. He looked through the room for another exit, quickly ruling out the hallway corridor through which he had come, certain that the natives had now breached the building, looking for who-knew-what.

He stepped to a window and looked through it down onto the manicured lawn below. Freedom was on the other side of the glass. He pushed up on the window: no budge. He heard Nereika whimpering in the silence of the room, could hear her feet scraping the floor as she tried to right herself, to regain her composure and come at him again. But a gut shot was a painful wound and she was a slight girl; he knew she would remain down, obsessed with the pain and the blood seeping through her fingers. He had seen that enough times, too: she wouldn’t live long without first aid.

He moved to the next window and tried to raise it, again bewildered by the sudden immobility of the doors and windows. Hadn’t they been easily opened just the other night? He turned and scanned the room quickly, his eyes resting on a nearby sword displayed on a wooden table. He tucked the pistol into his waist band, grasped the hilt of the sword and took it to the window, thrusting it into the window jamb and levering it like a crowbar. Still nothing. Arris was amazed.

Behind him, Arris heard the barest trace of a contemptuous laugh, the sound of someone watching a small rodent struggle in a maze, trying to find the lever for a pellet of food. Arris released the hilt of the sword and turned, drawing the pistol from his belt in a single movement in a manner he had done thousands of times before.

Only to see Onorien in his shimmering robe on the other side of the room, standing at total ease, his arm cocked ever-so-slightly upward, his index finger pointed at Arris. Shoot, Arris thought. Way too late for that. Onorien tugged his finger inward, once.

“Exarmo!”

The pistol ripped from Arris’ hand and spun through the air, dropping to the ground between him and Onorien and skittering across the floor. Onorien barely paid it attention as it came to a rest near his feet; a useless lump of metal forged my man in a computerized factory by machines calibrated to manufacture it with infinitesimal precision.

Arris snapped his arm back toward the sword stuck in the window jamb, his eyes trained on Onorien just long enough to see the slightest trace of a smile flash across his lips, barely revealing his teeth.

“Cohibeo!”

Arris was suddenly pushed against the wall by a hand of air, a force that simply wrapped around him and moved him effortlessly. He felt it but couldn’t believe it. He was enveloped by pressure on every square inch of his body and easily moved, slammed ever-so-slightly against the stone wall, the back of his head dinging it as he resisted. His resistance, though, had been futile. Not that there had been much time to try, but in the few micro-seconds it took to push him against the wall, he had been able to accomplish nothing in the way of slowing or stopping the air’s grip around his body. He had simply been moved by nothing.

Once against the wall, he was held fast. He strained against the unseen force but achieved nothing. Indeed, his attempts to move away from the wall were impotent from the start, the only evidence of his strains visible on his face. Onorien ignored him and walked across the room to where Nereika lay on the floor, writhing in pain. He bent down to her and touched her cheek, brushing away a few strands of hair with one hand while using the other to move the folds of clothing around the entry wound.

“Shh, you’ll be okay” Onorien said softly. And then he moved Nereika’s hands from her abdomen and splayed his right hand out above her blood-soaked robe. “Retardo!”

Arris watched this in amazement, not sure what Onorien was doing. Arris was pressed firmly against the wall by a force which had the consistency of a strong gust of wind, and, yet, there he was, immobilized by nothing. Nereika groaned, refocusing Arris’ attention on the robed duo for a moment, and he saw Onorien whispering to her, words Arris could not hear. He struggled, still, not ready to give up on his predicament, unable to place himself in a version of reality that made any sense.

Onorien stood up from the girl and walked over to Arris. Onorien’s face was calm, composed, and certain of his environment; everything Arris was not: a spider picking its way across its web toward a stuck fly. Arris watched him approach, struggling with every muscle to break free from the invisible grip that held him fast. Onorien smiled.

“You can strop struggling, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “You will remain where you are until I release you.”

“You know, I’m going to have to admit that I’m a little behind the power curve on what’s going on here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not good” Arris said. “At least, not for me.”

Onorien flashed some teeth. “You are not a man of faith, are you Mr. Arris?”

“Faith in what?”

“In anything I gather.”

“Well…”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I don’t exactly see where you’re going with this,” Arris said, latching on to one of Onorien’s words, trying to get the man to identify a common humanity between them.

Onorien simply stood there, looking at Arris as if there weren’t a care in the world, as if this were nothing more than a passing event his life, not something that re-defined the meaning of everything. Perhaps it was that for Onorien, but for Arris, life was now something more intricate, composed of parts he had been previously unaware existed. The hidden was now revealed, even if Arris was deeply unclear on what it was that he was learning. Arris stared at Onorien and a word materialized in his mind: wizard.

Not possible. Arris looked again: the man was wearing a robe that shimmered, shifting through the colors of the rainbow but giving off no luminescence. It glowed, but lit nothing. This white-haired man had spoken words – Latin? – and changed reality, forced the air to press him against the wall. Arris relaxed against the wall, wondered if there was a “why” coming. There had never been a why coming before, but, then, there had never been a reason for a why. Drug kingpins and wanna-be terrorist overlords had whys, but they never gave speeches when taken down, never monologued. One moment they were kings of the world, the next Arris and Gregoire were either killing them or fastening their wrists together with plastic zip ties, the fading smell of gun smoke in the air.

“For starters, Mr. Arris, perhaps you should tell me who you are and how you ended up on my island,” Onorien said.

It was in no way what Arris had expected to hear. It was a normal sentence, a routine request, something Arris reckoned every bad guy thought when he saw Arris and Team Opera poking into his reality, ending it with gunfire. This is how it ends? Really?

“I already told you that,” Arris said.

“You told me a story, yes, to be sure, but I am not quite so sure that an aerial tour operator would be flying around with a pistol hidden on his body,” Onorien said, his eyes flicking to the weapon lying inert on the floor.

“It’s dangerous here in the Caribbean,” Arris said, “dangerous in some pretty far-fetched ways, judging from the way things are unspooling.”

There was a loud commotion from down the hall, the sound of shouting and doors opening and closing. Slammed shut. The breaking of furniture and windows. Onorien turned his attention to the hallway and strode over to the entrance way, cocking his head to the side, listening. His eyes flitted back to Arris for a half-moment before returning to the hallway.

Arris looked beyond Onorien at the various items in the room, trying to ascertain if any of them could be of any use to him against Onorien. Not that it mattered, much, seeing as how Arris was plastered against the wall by air. He stretched and wiggled, and then he realized he wasn’t immobilized, only pressed against the wall. His arms and legs moved up and down, and as he experimented for a half-instant, he realized he could slide against the wall to his left or right. Onorien glanced back at him and Arris froze in place.

“Although, I’m starting to wonder if all this stuff you’ve got in here is the real deal,” Arris said.

Onorien lifted a finger, wagged it at Arris, and said “Pulsus!”

Arris’ body was suddenly pushed quickly into the wall, hard, the back of his skull banging against the stone. Stars erupted inside his eye sockets for a moment, and he blinked the pain away, shaking his head slightly.

Onorien seemed unperturbed by the disturbance down the hallways; he stood there listening in silent contemplation, as if the natives who had breached his house were not worth the trouble of confronting. Onorien turned and stared long and hard at Arris, as if it were Arris who were the real source of the day’s trouble.

“Now, Mr. Arris, I ask you again, how did you come to be here?” Onorien asked. “Who sent you?”

That there was this kind of worry in Onorien’s thought process intrigued Arris. On some level, Onorien was connected to the world off the island in a much more complicated way, and it was clear that Arris represented the possibility of an enemy at work. What kind of adversary was unknowable, but if Onorien was actually wasting time trying to talk answers out of Arris, then there was a greater scheme in existence, not just a crazy man with the ability to cast spells. Although, honestly, that was unbelievable enough.

Arris looked Onorien in the eyes and stuck with his cover story. “Nobody sent me here. I was on the way to pick up some honeymooners for an hour-long flight over the islands when my helicopter’s engine quit and I ended up in the drink.”

Arris paused for a long second, rolled his eyes around the hidden mystical force pinning him to the wall, and then stared back at Onorien. “Although, I think there’s a better question begging for an answer, and that’s ‘what the hell are you doing to me and how are you doing it?’”

Onorien’s shoulders sagged a bit, and the older man stared off into the distance through the window behind Arris’ shoulder. Arris took another tiny half-step to his side.

“It is a rather mundane Restraint Spell, Mr. Arris, and there is nothing you can do to free yourself,” Onorien said.

“Spell?”

“Yes. You don’t believe in divine forces, do you Mr. Arris? I infer also that you are probably the type of man who doesn’t believe in things he hasn’t seen with his own eyes, and, yet, here you are, subject to a force you cannot see and do not believe in,” Onorien said.

“But like most people in the modern world, you probably do believe in a whole host of things you have seen work but have no idea how. Have you ever seen your voice encoded and decoded by a telephone? How do a series of ones and zeroes on a disk of plastic create sound when scanned by a laser? How is it that everything technological in the modern world gets more powerful and yet also smaller with each passing year?

“Questions, Mr. Arris, with answers that most people have never thought to ask except as a passing joke. And, yet, everyone believes these devices will work when asked. Press the ON button and voila, your cellular phone connects you to the world, your satellite navigation system will guide you to your destination, your digital music player will queue up your entire music collection and play it in whatever order you desire. And the typical man or woman in Guadalajara or Montenegro or – “ Onorien sniffed out a brief laugh “ – London or Los Angeles has no idea why or how any of this technology works, just that it does.

“And at the same time, billions of people all over the globe believe in omniscient, omnipotent beings that orchestrated all that is on the planet, from the tiniest grain of sand’s exact location to what color eyes each creature on the planet should have, and yet nobody has ever seen or heard anything from any of these beings.”

Arris pushed his body away from the wall and made not a dent in the air, the force that held him fast had not lost any of its staying power over time. He stared at Onorien’s face and shrugged against the wall.

“Well, all that stuff’s not exactly forbidden knowledge. If I wanted to, I could probably find a technical manual or a Website explaining how any of it worked, and why,” Arris said. As for the religious bit, Arris wasn’t sure if Onorien was back to bar stool philosophizing or trying to needle him pointlessly.

“Exactly my point, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “You have faith you can prove your beliefs, even though you never bother to prove them to yourself. You have faith that a phone will work because it always does work. But when your Internet connection fails, don’t you sit there at your computer staring at it, saying –“ Onorien adopted a mocking voice of a helpless and bewildered computer illiterate “- ‘But it’s the Internet, it’s computers, how’s it not working?’”

Arris tilted his head slightly, more certain now that Onorien was not merely some island hermit hiding from the world, but some psychotic madman waiting in exile for his moment of return. “That’s why I switched from dial-up to broadband. It’s more reliable.”

“No, Mr. Arris, it is your faith in the new technology that made you switch, your faith that the newer is better, your blind faith that the scientists and engineers have figured out how the world works,” Onorien said. “But they have only figured out one way.”

Onorien raised his hand and pointed a finger at Arris. “Pulsus!”

Arris’ head banged off the wall, sending splinters of pain through his head. “Hey, do you have to do that?”

“Have you figured out any other ways the world might work, Mr. Arris?”

Just then, there was the sound of glass breaking followed by a shouted cheer of triumph. Arris looked to the doorway, the source of the noise, and wondered what was going on down the hallway.

“The natives are restless,” Onorien said. He turned away from Arris and walked over to Nereika, who had raised herself up on her elbows. “Nereika, can you stand?”

Nereika looked up at Onorien uncertainly, her eyes unfocussed and glassy. She closed them for a long moment, the sounds down the hallway rising in volume, and then opened them again accompanied with a series of deep breaths. She nodded, and Onorien extended his hand to Nereika to help her to her feet.

“Go hold them off until I arrive,” Onorien said to her. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Nereika nodded slightly, clutched her belly and moved off down the hallway. Onorien watched her as she shuffled down the hallway, and Arris moved a little to the side along the wall, unsure what he was angling for, but certain that moving was better than holding fast, even if it only ultimately changed the exact location of his death. Onorien approached him from across the room.

“Faith, Mr. Arris.”

“Faith?”

“Yes, it is the other way the world works.”’

“Faith in what?”

“Anything.”

Arris suppressed a sniff of a laugh. “Anything?”

“To an extent, certainly,” Onorien said. “Here you are, an atheist to the world of the divine, and yet an adherent to the world of science. So your faith, such as it is, is in the ability of a small group of a certain type of people to tell you what can and cannot be done. Recycle this, save this animal, eat this food, and don’t use this energy source.”

Onorien stepped back a bit and regarded Arris for a moment. “Is that not a religion?”

“I call it science,” Arris said, “although I eat what I want to, mostly.”

Onorien gave Arris a once-over as he was held fast to the wall. “Well, let’s see if science can free you.”

From down the hall there was an enormous detonation, an explosion that shook the floor of the display room as a bright flash of light blinked through the doorway, strobing through the room. Moments later, a cloud of dust wafted in from the hallway, and Onorien was suddenly concerned. He flicked a glance at Arris and then strode across the room to the entryway, staring down it and listening to the ongoing cacophony. Something was not going according to plan, and it had just occurred to Arris that there had been some sort of plan going on, interrupted when he poked his head into the chamber beneath Onorien’s study.

Not that Arris was slow on the uptake; he was just realizing that there had been something much larger at play when he entered the picture, and Arris’ unexpected arrival on the island was now altering the possibility of whatever outcome Onorien had been working toward. This explained why Onorien was bothering to keep him alive, given that Onorien could’ve turned Arris into a lump of charcoal by now, were Onorien convinced that other forces were not actively at work against him. The storming of the mansion by the natives was either the work of these other forces or God’s unseen hand at work, and Arris, held fast to the wall by nothing, was not sure which belief system to put his transitory faith in.

If there were a world of magic at work in his reality, he had never seen it. Indeed, outside of stage magicians, he had never even heard of it. And, yet, here he was, held fast by air against a wall by a wizard in a mansion in the Bermuda Triangle with a hidden suspicion of others at work against him. That Onorien feared these others enough to wonder if they had sent Arris gave Arris a moment of pause, a glimmer of hope, that maybe there were some avenue of escape. Arris wasn’t dead because Onorien thought he was part of the forces arrayed against him, which meant he might have information of use to the spell caster.

Whatever was happening down the hallway had now totally consumed Onorien’s attention, and he was conjuring fireballs and bolts of electricity and sending them flashing down the hallway, little flashes or sparks erupting from his fingertips in random colors. The sight of this made Arris want to laugh, just watching Onorien standing there in a shimmering, color-shifting robe: It was the best stage show Arris had ever seen. He had seen special effects crews at work on movies and television shows countless times over the years, and their work was often impressive in the raw, but it was pyrotechnics and men standing around holding fire extinguishers while some actor tried not to wince. This was awesome.

Chapter 31

Gregoire poked his way slowly through the scrub brush and trees that formed the curtain of foliage at the edge of the jungle, demarking it from the beach as a separate sphere of nature. The island was quiet and Gregoire was on edge. Nature was never more silent than when man was about to wreak havoc in it; how the creatures of the earth knew this had always been a mystery to Gregoire, but it was a fact he had long-since grown comfortable knowing. The lack of noise was the loudest indication that trouble was about, that someone was intent on causing a storm.

He paused and listened again, stilling his breath and ignoring the gentle whoosh of blood through his eardrums. His eyes peered through the darkness at the moonlit shapes, trying to recognize patterns in nature, evidence of man. Nothing.

And then he heard a creak, borne in by the wind from the beach, and he turned his head and stepped to the very edge of the tree line. A hundred yards off shore floated the wooden sloop, its sails dropped, the fog low on the water, barely glowing in the moonlight. Gregoire stared out at it, the words “ghost ship” suddenly materializing in his mind. Although, to be sure, he had also seen it in broad daylight earlier that day, so if it were a ghost ship, it was one capable of spooky and not-so-spooky sailing. Gregoire smiled to himself at the notion of “not-so-spooky” sailing and gazed at the fog-enshrouded sloop offshore. Definitely spooky at the moment, so he hoisted his weapon in his hands and re-affirmed his connection to it.

Then a small rowboat rounded the bow of the sloop, a team of shadowy figures at work on the oars, all of them in synch. The crash of the waves on the beach drowned out any noise from the boat, and Gregoire watched it steadfastly as it slowly cut through the water toward the shore. He glanced back at the boat and could see two silhouettes standing along the railing of the ship, watching the rowboat’s departure. How many more were aboard the sloop? And, what were they doing rowing ashore to an island that did not exist?

Gregoire looked around at the island, certain it did exist. Also, certain it was not on the map on his boat. Gregoire readied his weapon and began creeping along the edge of the scrim of underbrush and trees, keeping himself to the shadows and avoiding the columns of moonlight that stabbed through the jungle.

Gregoire watched as eight figures clambered out of the boat. One of them separated from the group and began waving a small object toward the jungle line. Another gathered a couple of the others to himself and appeared to give instructions to the remaining four, who pulled … swords? … out of the inside of the rowboat and took guard positions up around the boat. Gregoire watched as the other four ventured off into the jungle and shrugged to himself, concluding he might as well continue following them.

Chapter 32

Thijmen and the others in his raiding party had watched with curiosity and disbelief when the younger white man had opened the main door of the mansion and stared at them. Clearly, the man had not expected to see them making their way across the lawn. That had been evident by the sudden change in the man’s body posture, a switch Thijmen had caught on to instantly: from bad to worse; from escape to flee. And then the man had closed door quickly, remaining inside.

Thijmen and Willem had exchanged glances over that, each of them wondering what the man could have been thinking. It had been clear, for a moment, that the man was intent on getting out of the mansion until he had seen them crossing the lawn. They meant the man no harm, not expressly, not unless the man gave them trouble; they had not interacted with him in any meaningful way since the night he washed ashore and Pieter had gone through the man’s things and taken the man’s knife and fishing gear. Then again, there had been the beach incident with Nereika, but that had been directed at their old friend, not the white man.

Inside the main door, they had moved off down the nearest hallway, on the right, and quickly become lost inside. The place was infinitely larger inside than he had ever imagined, the hallways longer and lined with doors. The rooms behind the doors were almost all the same, changing only slightly with the color of the furniture inside. And then when he had turned another corner and found Tamerika standing in the intersection of hallways where he had just left her moments before, his sense of direction had suddenly dropped to zero. It was not possible to have made his way down the hallways he had just walked and come up on Tamerika where she now stood, and yet he had. There she was, standing where he had just left her, looking at him as if nothing were wrong. Thijmen tightened his grip around his sword.

“It’s not possible, is it?” Willem said coming alongside him as the rest of the raiding party halted.

“What?” Thijmen asked, not wanting to let it be known that he was lost.

“We just went down this hallway in the opposite direction, and now here we are, as if we came out of a mirror,” Willem said. “We should be somewhere down there.”

Willem pointed down the hall in the direction from which they had just come. Thijmen stared down the length of doors, wondering if Willem were correct. His instincts said yes, but he could not understand how. Thijmen turned his head slowly toward his friend and let out the slightest of shrugs.

“I don’t know,” Thijmen said. “And I agree, we should be down there somewhere, but we aren’t. We’re here.”

Thijmen looked around the foyer and up the grand staircase curling up around the opposite wall. All of this was new to him as there were no hallways or extra rooms or stairs in the huts and boats he had lived his entire life in. He only knew of such things at all from some of the stories handed down from the elders of times now long gone when members of the crew had been invited inside the mansion to talk about life on the island. But that was more than two generations ago. What did someone do with so much enclosed space, Thijmen wondered?

He tried to gain his bearings and orient himself to the world he knew so well outside the mansion. There to the side was the now-closed main entry door. They had walked down several interlocking hallways and ended up where they had begun. It was impossible. He looked again at Tamerika, standing down the hallway at the intersection. She smiled. He smiled back at her.

“Maybe we should go up?” Willem said, motioning toward the staircase.

Thijmen looked up the staircase, again. Maybe they had checked the entirety of the first floor and found nothing. Maybe he had just turned too many right corners and not kept track. Maybe nothing was amiss.

KA-KRAKOW POOM! The noise resonated down through the foyer, accompanied with the compression of the air all around them, the bodies of Tjeld and Kareta flying through the air from the second floor hallway atop the stairs and smashing into the wall high above, falling to the ground with dull thuds. Thijmen stared at his two fallen comrades, alive just minutes before when they had disappeared through the jungle with Pieter on their way to the Dead Calm entrance. Now, they were dead, their bodies broken. They were no longer part of the lifecycle; they now belonged to the earth. How? What had just happened to them?

Thijmen glanced at Willem, who tightened his grip around his spear. Thijmen flitted his eyes off the rest of the members of his party, each of them looking directly at him for a decision on what action to take. Thijmen wanted someone to make that decision for him, wanted someone to tell him which course of action was right, what the outcome of each decision would be. But there was nobody there that could do that, and he looked back up to the top of the stairs, where he knew his good friend Pieter must be, leading his own party deeper into the mansion. Pieter would be expecting him to follow. The captain, too. The door to more life stood just a few feet away, easily openable, and the rest of his party would follow if he led them in flight.

Another loud noise tore through the fabric of the air, vibrating the hairs on his arms and legs. For a moment, Thijmen could hear the slight ringing of the metal objects on the nearby display tables before the hasty breathing of his nearby comrades drowned it out. Never in his twenty years had Thijmen imagined he would face a moment like this one, where the lives of his friends – and his life – would stand in such stark relief, contrasting life and death so clearly. He had always imagined he would drown at sea, his boat capsized in a sudden storm, his body consumed by the fish at the bottom of the water. Dying in a mansion on a beautiful summer night had never occurred to him.

“Alright, let’s go up,” Thijmen said, the words floating out of his mouth as if they had always been meant to be said, no doubt lying wait in any of the syllables, the thought of death suddenly unimaginable.

Chapter 33

Arris slid along the length of the wall in small steps, watching Onorien at work in the doorway. Watching Onorien at work? The man was casting spells down a hallway at the invading natives, presumably turning them into charcoal briquettes as he had the man in the hidden basement chamber. Something – everything – was wrong.

Just then a spear flashed through the doorway, a small decorative blue feather near the handle, and missed Onorien by a hairsbreadth. It cut through the air and then fell with a dull clatter to the ground, its effort expended, gravity and drag having taken their toll. Onorien glanced at it on the floor for a moment before he turned his head toward Arris and gave him a once-over. Arris recognized the look on Onorien’s face: that was too close. Onorien pulled the crystal from a fold in his robe, a shimmer of rainbow colors undulating through the fabric. He raised the crystal to the level of his chest and extended his arms before him.

“Procella Infucatus!”

The crystal glowed to life, blinking on as if a switch had been thrown. Within micro-seconds, the glow slipped beyond the confines of the crystal and enveloped Onorien’s hands, quickly forming into a spectral beam, the colors of the rainbow hovering in the air like a yardstick mounted to the crystal. The colors deepened and became sharper, as if Onorien were adjusting menu functions on a color television, and then the beam darted forward, stretching from the crystal in a line through the hallway door and out of Arris’ sight. There was a shout from down the hallway, then a shriek, then the mixed sounds Arris’ knew well as sudden panic. It was the sound men make when unit cohesion has gone to hell and each man thinks only of himself, the sudden desire to clutch to life the sole focus of each man. It was a strange sound, but once you heard it, you never forgot it.

Onorien began moving down the hallway, disappearing through the doorway threshold without as much as a glance back at Arris. Whatever Onorien was up to, Arris figured Onorien was in complete and total control of the situation. Arris took another small step to the side and banged his temple into something hard, his head stung with sharp pain and his eyes moistened slightly as he gritted his teeth and held his breath. He tightened the muscles in his body to keep from flinching or over-reacting to the unexpected pain.

He raised his hand up to his temple and massaged it for a moment. He turned his head and looked at the black-bladed sword created by a delusional German baron almost two-hundred years earlier. Arris slid his arm against the wall to the hilt of the sword and pushed it, hoping he could tilt it on the wall to allow him to pass by when he was freed from the wall. The suddenness of the release almost caused him to collapse to the ground and he used every reflex honed during a lifetime of special operations work to keep his balance and maintain his wits. For a moment, he bent over at the waist in a bastardized yoga “triangle pose,” concentrating on his breathing and flexing and relaxing his muscles, centering his balance.

His left hand was still touching the hilt of the sword, pressed against it for balance, his other arm outstretched, his legs resisted wobbling as he concentrated on regaining his center of gravity. He turned his head and looked up at the sword and there, clear as daybreak after a storm, was a high-intensity glow emanating from the small green crystal set in the bottom of the sword’s pommel. He stood up and scanned the display room; he listened for Onorien, but Arris only heard a weird rush of air, a sound like one heard in a conch shell pressed against an ear.

Arris glanced back at the sword on the wall, the little gem still aglow, and he reached for it, pulling it down with his right hand. He turned the blade over and felt its heft, felt the precise balance between tip and pommel, the center of gravity just forward of his wrist-hold on the hilt. Indeed, the weapon almost felt as if it had no weight, as if it were an extension of his hand, and he twisted it quickly through the air with a few quick flicks to inform his arm of its mechanics. And still, the small stone in the base of the hilt glowed.

Arris stepped away from the wall cautiously, confused at the nature of his release. He made his way through the room and to the edge of the hallway threshold, tilting his head into the space to look down the hallway. Onorien was still walking down the hallway toward the top of the curving staircase that led to the main entry foyer of the mansion. Beyond him, Arris could see a half-dozen of the natives, most still armed with spears, one with an ancient sword, all of them backtracking in panic.

And then the beam of light flashed out from the crystal like the tongue of a snake, engulfing a spear-holding native and instantly shredding him into nothingness. There was no scream, no last desperate gasp, no spasm to cling to life; one moment, the man had stood there, taking small steps backward, the next he was a hole in the air, a spot where a man had stood, where a life had been living. If Arris hadn’t seen a man turned into a block of ashes earlier that evening, he would not have believed what he had now just seen. Or, rather, he would not have known what to make of what he had just seen. Which was still the case, for the most part, as he watched Onorien take another step down the hallway.

Arris crept closer to Onorien, watching the man as he stepped slowly toward the shrinking natives. Arris felt the sword in his hands, the weight of the weapon pressing against the palm of his hands. He tightened his hands around the hilt and let the weight of his body ease onto the ball of each foot as he stepped slowly toward Onorien, his eyes trained on the back of the man, watching as Onorien approached the retreating natives.

“Impello!” Onorien said softly, just loud enough that Arris could hear though not meant for him to hear, and the spectrum of light flicked out quickly, again, enveloping another spear-wielder, disintegrating him into nothing but air and imagination.

For a moment, before the man had dissolved into history, the native bearing the sword had taken notice of Arris. Their eyes had locked, the native giving Arris a look of uncertainty. Of hope. Of bewilderment. In that instant, Arris realized the native had also not expected this outcome was even more amazed at the turn of events. But, also, the man with the beaten sword wondered what it was Arris was doing, creeping slowly, stealthily upon the crystal-wielding multi-colored-robe wearing white-haired man.

The sudden evaporation of the second man, however, changed the composition of the group’s courage, and whatever common cause they shared disappeared along with the man. Arris had seen this reaction before scores of times across the globe. Unit cohesion could only take so much and it was impossible to know what would break a group of men into individuals until after the fact, but the moment the spear-wielder ceased to be was also the moment the remaining five men realized their own mortality. Two of the men with sharpened-bone-tipped spears dropped them and turned head-long down the hall and sprinted for their lives. A breath later, two other men with spears turned and followed suit.

There was a long pause, an eternity expanded by adrenalin and disbelief, as Arris took several more cautious steps and the native with the sword tried to reconcile reality with whatever his preconceptions were. The native backed into the chamber that was the top of the entry foyer, the curving staircase railing to his left, the dome of the room above him. He glanced once more at Arris, a flick of his eyes over Onorien’s shoulders, a look that communicated an enormity of disbelief and despair.

Chapter 34

Thijmen and Willem had only taken a few steps toward the staircase when the first two of Pieter’s party emerged in full run from the hallway above them, turning the corner and bounding down the stairs as if they were being chased by certain death. Not that Thijmen could actually imagine it that way: there was nothing on the island that had ever chased anyone in any manner that would have caused the panic-stricken looks on the faces of his two friends. But the two men paid Thijmen and his group no heed, slowed not a step as they reached the bottom stairs and fled through the open main door into the night beyond the mansion’s threshold. Willem gave Thijmen a look that lasted only an instant before two more from Pieter’s group skidded from the hallway above them and took the steps two-at-a-time, following their counterparts out of the mansion.

“What do you think is going on?” Willem asked.

Thijmen looked at his friend, then at the rest of his raiding party. Whatever courage and confidence they had just had moments ago was gone, and all eyes were on the open doorway and the manicured lawn beyond it, the safety of the jungle on the other side of it.

“Electricus!” said a weak voice from off to the side, and Willem was suddenly shaking violently, a strange red ribbon of light leading from his body across the room to another hallway in which stood Nereika, her blood-drenched hands outstretched before her. Thijmen watched in curious disbelief as the red light pulsed from the palms of her hands, small drops of blood falling to the floor. She wore a robe with a large soak spot of blood near her abdomen, a stain working its way down her left leg. She was pale.

And then Willem stopped convulsing and the red light from Nereika’s hands vanished. Willem stumbled backward clumsily. Thijmen stared dumbfounded at Nereika, who dropped her hands to her side and breathed deeply, concentrating on something. Thijmen glanced at the rest of his party; all eyes were on Nereika. Tamerika rushed down the hallway past the rest of the party and came to a stop.

“Thijmen, we must go, now,” she said, grasping his forearm.

Thijmen looked up at the top of the stairs, movement catching his attention in his peripheral vision. He saw Pieter back out of the hallway, Pieter’s attention focused on whatever it was he was retreating from. And then a rainbow engulfed his friend and Pieter was shredded into bits of light, his body effervescing from substance into memory. For a moment, there had been a spot on the planet where his best friend had stood, and then there was emptiness. Thijmen’s jaw dropped open and his arms grew slack. He felt Tamerika’s grip on his arm tighten, then release. There was a collective gasp from the rest of his group, and then the white-haired man stepped from the hallway and walked to the railing and stared down at them.

Chapter 35

Gregoire followed the crew of the rowboat at a distance, keeping them visible in shafts of moonlight. The group moved slowly, the members picking their way through the underbrush as if each were drunk or encumbered in some way. None of the members moved with any natural skill across the landscape; their movements were jerky. Gregoire considered this a factor in his favor, should it come to anything: he was perfectly at ease in the jungle.

The group stopped in a small clearing and gathered around a man with a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it. Gregoire thought this odd - the feather - and dropped to a knee. All of the men were curiously attired, as if they were extras from a movie about pirates. Gregoire resisted a smile and lifted his rifle so that he could stare through the scope at the men. Even in the moonlight, though, he could make nothing out to identify any of the men: all had on some sort of headwear that obscured their faces and none were facing him.

Gregoire allowed his attention to shift to the jungle, his eyes and ears searching for new clues about what the men’s purpose might be, keeping the group in his peripheral vision. The group had to be going somewhere at this hour, and the island couldn’t be that large, so Gregoire reckoned they were close to whatever it was they were looking for. But there was only jungle and preternatural silence; a lone cloud passed through the disk of the moon above. Gregoire sighted back through the scope at the group, which had now come to a decision and begun moving off.

A burst of light suddenly glowed in the distance, a bubble of revolving colors flickering through the trees of the jungle. A large crackle filled the air, a sound resembling the collapse of a large building or the snapping of trees in a sudden avalanche. Gregoire froze in place, keeping his eyes on the group of men ahead of him. They stopped, too, and through the rifle’s scope Gregoire could see one of them consulting something in his hand, which he then held up as if he were using it to scan his surroundings. Gregoire expected something to happen next although he was now entirely uncertain as to what that could be, as it was clear that the group he was following was just as surprised as he was at the sudden turn of events. Gregoire crouched in the underbrush and watched the strange crewmen, now suddenly animated and gesticulating both to the lights and to where the ship was moored. Something strange was afoot.

Chapter 36

Arris took another small step forward toward Onorien, raised the sword above his head and stepped quickly, bringing the black blade down in a quick arc. The sword sliced into Onorien’s shoulder, cutting through the deltoid muscle and biting into the bone beneath. The wizard stumbled to his left with the impact; the crystal in his hands popped up into the air and tumbled into the void over the railing.

Onorien turned quickly toward Arris, moving more quickly than Arris had anticipated, but not quickly enough to avoid being stabbed in the stomach by the black blade. In a quick move, Arris pulled the blade from Onorien’s shoulder and whirled it around for a thrust, turning the blade flat to the ground so it could easily be pushed straight through the man’s solar plexus and between any ribs so it wouldn’t get caught between bones. Arris pushed it out Onorien’s back. The wizard clasped the entry wound, his fingers curling around the blade. A trickle of blood eased from between his lips, his eyes wide with astonishment.

“You fool,” Onorien said, gravity pulling his body toward the floor and from the blade. He slapped onto the ground, his head making a hollow thud as it struck the stone floor. It was a sound with which Arris was familiar.

Arris stepped to the railing and looked over, unsurprised to see another group of the island natives below. They stared up at Arris in bewilderment and full of fear, a few of them edged slowly toward the open main door of the mansion. One man stood directly below him holding a worn cutlass, its blade narrow from decades of sharpening and usage. Arris looked into the man’s eyes, searching for the man’s next action when Arris noticed the crystal, still pulsing with spectral light, growing in intensity as it lay on the ground in the middle of the foyer.

The rainbow of light flickered out like a small bullwhip, licking the floor at first, eliminating small divots of stone with each touch. Each time it devoured substance, it grew slightly in intensity and size. Seconds passed as Arris watched the light pulse out and flicker through the air. The native with the sword turned his attention to it as well, his eyes switching from Arris to the beam of multi-colored light. For a moment, everything was silent and the eyes of everyone in the chamber watched the curious light show.

And then the beam flared, touching one of the spear-wielding natives on the calf, vaporizing his leg and quickly enveloping him in a cloud of colors. For a moment, an instant, there was a man holding a spear in a fog of rainbow light, and then there was nothing but a hollow in the air. There was no sound; the man uttered no scream, no gasp of astonishment. He had been and then wasn’t.

The native with the sword quickly changed his attention to the others on his team, all of whom were now running past him for the door, to the safety of the jungle outside. The man looked back up at Arris, looking for Arris to provide some sort of explanation to what was going on. Arris shrugged and shook his head slightly.

The beam of light let loose with another spasm, flashing across the room and eliminating a side table, deleting it from existence. The man below him stood motionless, his arms slack, the tip of his sword dangling just above the floor. Arris flexed his grip on the hilt of the black blade, gaining some comfort in its heft and firmness. He was not helpless.

Just then there was a small whimper that mounted into a wail of grief, and Nereika stumbled through the foyer below him, her hands on her own wound. She took small steps toward the door, weeping in greater intensity with each step as she made her way across the floor, tears streaming down her cheeks. She ignored the man with the sword and didn’t look up the staircase at Arris as she exited the room, her shoulders rising with each heave of breath. And then she was across the threshold and gone into the night.

The crystal pulsed with light; the beam gathered into itself and formed a ball on the floor, burrowed into the stone and created a semi-sphere the size of a beach ball, the color of the light increasing in luminance. This was enough for the sword-wielding native, who turned and sprinted for his life for the safety of the lawn beyond the door, leaving Arris atop the staircase with the dying gasps of Onorien suddenly breaking the silence of the night.

The room flashed brightly with white light. Arris’ eyes closed automatically in response and his instincts forced his body to duck into a crouch, raising his hands above his head. There was a tearing crack and Arris opened his eyes in time to see a beam of light pour up from the floor and tear a hole in the ceiling of the foyer, the stonework fracturing and crashing down. The room was beginning to cave in.

Arris turned and stared down at Onorien, who appeared to be concentrating mightily on something outside of his current reality. Arris stepped to him and bent over.

“Can you turn that thing off?”

Chapter 37

Pike hopped over the side of the row boat and into the surf, the water lapping through his legs and splashing his face. He grabbed a side of the dingy and heaved it toward the shore with the rest of the raiding party, and he felt exhilaration he hadn’t felt in more than a hundred years. Finally, the search was at an end. Finally, a chance to mete out violence and justice to the man who had enabled the curse. Finally, the chance to undo it.

They dragged the small craft onto the sand and Pike turned to the four crewman that had accompanied him, Sharktooth, Thurmond and Portnoy.

“You four stay here with the boat. We won’t be too long,” Pike said. “If we’re not back by daybreak, though, take your own measure of the curse, choose a new captain and choose your course of action ‘cause none of us four will be likely able to lend a hand seein’ as we’ll likely be dead.”

Pike snickered at that last bit. “Well, something closer to it than we be now, anyhow.”

Pike turned to the other three, rested his left hand atop the handle of his sheathed sword, and nodded toward the jungle. “Alright, let’s go find the bastard.”

Sharktooth stepped toward the treeline, lifted the crystal base and watched as the concentric circles collapsed and repeated in indigo until he had lined up the proper direction. He turned the base off course in either direction, just to be sure he was reading it right, and then fixed it back on the target, the circles quickly contracting to a dot.

“Aye, this is the way, cap’n,” Sharktooth said.

The four of them picked their way through the foliage of the jungle without problem, stepping through the natural world while much of it ignored them. The few nocturnal creatures that witnessed the crewmembers of the Killjoy passing by did not register them as a threat, and ignored them. The few resting dayside animals upon which the foursome passed stirred in their sleep, watched the men approach but did not quiver in fear or nestle closer to the earth. Even when the four passed through shafts of moonlight, the world largely ignored them.

The four skeletal men were not meant to be of the world, but beside it, witnesses to the life they had once had, but banned from it. And, as such, the world paid the cursed men back with indifference to them, mostly.

Just then there was a distant crack thunder followed by a beam of light that poked up into the night sky. The foursome stopped and watched the column of light for a moment, and cocked their heads to the side to point their ear holes toward the source of the sound. There was a faint rumble before the tower of light twisted about and split into several differently colored beams of willowy light. The skeletons turned to each other.

“This is wrong,” Sharktooth said, showing the crystal base to the others. The concentric circles were now pulsing outward from the center, a dot of indigo erupting in a reverse rainbow of circles that disappeared off the edges of the base, going everywhere. “This should not be doing that.”

“What’s it mean, then?” Portnoy said quickly, looking around the jungle for other unexpected situations.

“Can’t say, exactly,” Sharktooth said, taking a step away from the others and raising the base above his head and turning it through the air.

There was a crashing crescendo in the distance that drew the attention of the foursome, and they all noticed the increasing amount of light beams in the air, now swaying to and fro. Pike stepped alongside Sharktooth.

“Methinks this is not such a good turn of events, and I can’t even see what’s goin’ on, ‘xactly,” Pike said, “Care to shower a guess on me as to what you think we be in awe of?”

“Something’s gone wrong with the eye, Cap’n, is the only thing I know for sure,” Sharktooth said, tapping the base. “This is the opposite of what the locator should be doin’, and I don’t think it even can be doin’ it, which means something powerful is at work.”

“The wizard?” said Thurmond as he stepped alongside the two and stared at the base.

“Oh, to be sure,” Sharktooth said.

“He can’t have known we were coming,” Portnoy said. “Not even we knew we were coming until yesterday, and even then none of us knew where. It’s impossible.”

“And once upon a time we had flesh on our bones, ol’ Port, and I’d have laughed in your face if you’d a suggested a man could live a long life without it,” Pike said, absently drumming his fingers on his sword hilt. “Impossible? We spent a long time livin’ the world and I’m a fair shake certain there’s more yet my eyes ain’t yet lain upon.”

And then the wind whipped up in intensity, the lights in the sky twisting violently through the air and separating into ever more colors. Sharktooth turned and showed the base to the others: the circles were blinking from an indigo dot in the center to off the edge like a strobe light, erupting from the base in a blaze of colors and washing the four former men in the colors of the rainbow.

“Can’t be good, even for us,” Sharktooth said.

Pike scanned the faces of the other three and shrugged his bony shoulders beneath his topcoat. “Let’s get back to the ship right quick and read’ her up to sail,” he said, turning and looking back at the source of the light, his expression as wistful as a bony face could be, before another rumbling crackle made its way from the light source. “As quick as we can, now!”

Chapter 38

Onorien barely noticed Arris, if at all, his attention elsewhere. Blood pooled on the floor beneath Onorien, forming a wide spot around the fading shimmering robe; small foamy blood bubbles popped from Onorien’s mouth. Whatever concerns Onorien had, they were not with the immediate world.

Arris glanced back at the crumbling foyer area, the night sky exposed, ceiling collapsing in as the light beam swayed and increased in size and intensity. That exit was gone to him. He sprinted down the hallway and turned into the display room, past the artifacts and collectibles and directly to the door. It was still held fast.

Arris swore under his breath. He took several steps backward, centered himself on one of the windows, and heaved the black blade at it. It shattered as if it were made out of sugar glass, a phony plate glass window for a Hollywood stunt man to crash through. This would have surprised Arris were it not for the increasingly loud snapping and crackling that was rippling down the hallway toward him like someone working their way down the keyboard of a xylophone tuned to the key of destruction. Arris darted to the window and clambered quickly through it, dropped onto the balcony and then flipped over the railing to the grass below, wasting no time considering his situation.

The sword was only a few feet away from him, buried half-way into the grass by the blade, the small green jewel glowing furiously. Arris ignored it, scanning the landscape nearby for natives lying in wait. There was nothing. Anybody who had been around was now long gone, likely fleeing at full-sprint through the jungle.

Arris turned and looked back at the mansion. It glowed from within with ghostly light, the windows lit up in the colors of the rainbow as if for a Christmas show. But it was also being eaten alive by the light, the mansion giving its life to the beam with hideous shrieks as the structure collapsed from within and evaporated.

Across the lawn he saw Nereika stumbling toward the jungle, moving slowly, her hands clasped over her stomach wound. Arris felt bad for a moment for having shot her before remembering that she was still a threat capable of … whatever it was she was capable of. And then Arris watched Nereika collapse to her knees and roll on to her side, wrapping her arms around her knees and letting loose with inconsolable sobs of grief. Arris re-scanned the jungle line at the edge of the grass before crouch-walking his way slowly across the lawn toward Nereika.

Chapter 39

Gregoire was frozen in place on his knees, his rifle held at the ready as a dozen people raced by him. None saw him, and he barely had time to register their presence. They were all running at full throttle. He heard them thudding through the jungle for almost a minute before the first person dashed through some nearby moonbeams, revealing himself to be a skinny light-skinned black man wearing raggedy clothing, a thin beard and carrying a homemade spear. The rest followed through in a disorganized retreat: every man for himself.

Gregoire watched the last pair run by him, both women. He didn’t know what to make of the fact that the women had either been left behind or were taking up the rear. He watched them follow along in the footsteps of the men, vanishing through the moonlit jungle into the darkness in the direction of the small village.

Gregoire returned his attention to the group he had been following and saw that they had already begun moving off, away from the glow in the jungle and back toward where they had come ashore on the beach. For a moment, he considered following them back to the boat, but he realized quickly that that was not where the action was. Wherever they had originally been headed was the place to be, and that place was glowing brightly in the jungle on an uncharted island in the Bermuda Triangle. He gripped his rifle and began picking his way through the underbrush and trees, making his way toward the light show.

Chapter 40

Thijmen darted across the lawn at full speed, his mind racing at what he had just seen inside the mansion. What had he seen inside the mansion? It made no sense. His friends had vanished into thin air, destroyed by a rainbow. In all his life, rainbows had been beautiful, nature’s announcement that the storm was over, that all was well. Now, they were harbingers of doom. How was such a thing possible?

He crossed the barrier of bushes into the jungle line and skidded to a stop. He turned and looked back at the mansion, saw a beam of multi-colored light erupt through the roof and bring the entry way collapsing down in a loud crash. What power had been unleashed by the white-haired man? And then he saw a silhouette stumbling across the lawn, ambling in no definitive direction, moaning in pain and weeping. Nereika. He took a step back toward the lawn and felt a hand grip his bicep. He turned and looked into Willem’s face.

“Look, its Nereika,” Thijmen said, nodding his head toward their old friend.

“I know,” Willem said.

“We can save her, now.”

Just then the air shattered in a small flash from one of the windows along the side of the building, a black disk spinning through the air before landing, a blade thrust into the grass of the lawn. A few heartbeats later, the younger white man crawled quickly through the window and dropped to the balcony, vaulting over the railing onto the lawn below.

The two men exchanged glances, and then Willem looked past his friend at Nereika, who had made her way to the middle of the lawn and collapsed to her knees, her red robe losing its ghostly shimmer with each moment that went by.

“We can’t be sure,” Willem said.

The pair watched as the stranger from the beach crossed the lawn toward Nereika, the man in a wary crouch, as if he expected Nereika to turn on him. Thijmen looked again at Willem.

“This might be our only chance, he’s alone.”

Willem shook his head. “No. We can’t risk it. We don’t know what he’s capable of. You saw what the white-haired man did.”

Through the jungle they heard the footfalls of the last of their party, scattered through the underbrush, running in panic.

“We should go, now,” Willem said.

Thijmen took one last look at his long lost friend, felt a pang of loss all over again, turned into the jungle and ran for the village with his friend.

Chapter 41

Arris circled warily around the girl. She was sobbing heavily, her arms wrapped around her knees. She rocked ever-so-slightly on the ground. Arris was confused. Just a few minutes ago she had been a malevolent force intent on electrocuting him and the island natives, and now she was an inconsolable teen-age girl.

He stopped in front of her and stood up. Arris surveyed the jungle line again, and then turned back to the girl, who had now rolled back over to a sitting position. She was trying to rein in her breathing, laboring mightily to slow down the sobs. She clutched her stomach and grimaced in pain.

“Thank you,” she said, looking up at Arris.

Arris was stunned. He stepped back and roved his eyes around the area.

“Thank you?” Arris said softly. “I shot you.”

Nereika shook her head. “No, thank you. Whatever you did, you set me free.”

The mansion crackled and burst, drawing Arris’ attention. The beam of light had disintegrated into its component colors, light tentacles of the spectrum waving through the air, lengthening into the night sky and bending back down to the ruined structure. Arris didn’t know what to make of it.

“Freed you? From what?”

Nereika gripped her wound and fought the pain. “From him. From Onorien. I’ve been his slave here for years,” she said, her head rolling, her eyelids closing slightly. “The things he’s made me do…”

Tears streamed down her face. “The things he’s done to me…”

She sobbed. Arris stared down at her in disbelief, totally confused.

“I thought … I just …” she said, lowering her head to her knees and sobbing more, “I thought it would never end. The things he did to me. I couldn’t stop any of it.”

The wind across the island picked up, drawn to the light storm enveloping the mansion as it was devoured by the tendrils of light. Arris stared in disbelief, his eyes delivering images his brain could not process as reality. But, there it was, happening. The bright green glow of the jewel on the sword’s pommel caught his attention. Everything meant something, he was sure, but none of it meant anything to him.

“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, this is all new to me,” Arris said, bending down on one knee and extending his hand out to Nereika. “But I’m going to guess that this is one of those moments where running is required.”

The mansion let loose with another low moan as more of it ceased to be, and several of the waving beams of colored lights whipsawed against the sky and fell back to the ground, licking giant scars in the lawn.

“Can you at least walk?”

Nereika nodded and took his hand, letting Arris help her to her feet. She leaned against him and gripped her bullet wound.

“How’s your belly feel?”

“It hurts, but Onorien slowed the bleeding, so I’ll be fine for a while until I can be healed.”

“Will you last until the supply boat gets here?”

Nereika looked up at him. “There is no supply boat. Onorien said that just to keep you calm for a few days. He was never going to let you leave here.”

Arris helped her start walking, his mind racing through the events of the last few days, trying to fit the pieces into a coherent shape.

“Then how do you get on and off the island?” Arris asked.

The wind intensified quickly, blowing Nereika’s deadened robe against her body, exposing her form beneath. Arris’ clothes sucked close to his body, and he took a forced step away from the mansion toward the jungle, letting Nereika rest her weight on his shoulder. There was a rumbling of thunder from behind them, evidence of the total structural collapse of the mansion as the prismatic maelstrom engulfed the structure.

Arris did his best to hustle Nereika away from the structure, into the safety of the jungle, his eyes scanning through the darkness beyond the tree line. Behind him, the variegated colors had separated into still more strands of distinctive beams, each waving through the sky or whipping across the ground. One beam, a pure cadmium beam licked up into the night air and bent over, falling quickly down to the earth and undulating across the ground, eliminating spots of earth in a series of divots as it bounced along the surface. The end of the beam rebounded up from the ground and struck the black sword mid-blade. For a moment, the light show stuttered and the scores of light beams held fast where they were, frozen in space.

And then they turned off and the island was shrouded in darkness, the pale light of the moon the only illumination. The wind dropped to stillness and silence. For a few moments, the only sounds to be heard were the lingering cracks and tumbling of stones in the mansion as gravity continued its work pulling the structure down.

Arris froze in place, halting Nereika beside him. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder. The silhouette of the mansion had been turned into a ragged structure against the side of the mountain, a series of collapsed walls and emptiness where once there had been stone. A smudge of smoke floated up from it, fracturing in the breeze above the tree tops, disintegrating into the night. He turned over his shoulder and glanced at Nereika, as if she might be up to offering some explanation, but she stood hunched over, her hands clutched her gut. Arris looked around at the landscape, his eyes rolled through the scenery. The world was a new place with hidden dimensions and he wondered what to make of it.

Chapter 42

Gregoire had just made it to the edge of a lawn when the lights went out. Whatever it was, it had been amazingly beautiful. Wispy beams of colored light had been waving against the sky like sea grass, swaying in the breeze. Scores of beams had been gleaming, and then they had vanished, replaced by the light from the moon. Everything about this island was wrong, and Gregoire had hoped for some insight at the source of the light show. Instead, he stood in a tree line bordering a well-manicured grass lawn, a ruined structure on the far side of the grass, a pair of people just close enough to be recognizable as a man and a woman. The man was holding a sword, which Gregoire took to be both odd and evidence of potential danger, so he adjusted his weapon and made his way quietly along the edge of the jungle, keeping himself from being silhouetted and exposed.

“Stay right where you are and make no sudden movements,” Gregoire said from the shadows, the weapon raised to his shoulders, sighted center mass on the duo.

“Greg?”

“Dave?”

Gregoire flipped the rifle’s rail flashlight on and swept it over the pair, astounded to see Arris and a young black girl standing before him. Gregoire lowered the weapon and stepped to Arris, giving him a bear hug. Arris returned it less enthusiastically, slightly embarrassed by his friend’s display of affection. They separated and regarded each other for a moment.

“How did you get here?” Arris asked.

“In a boat, of course,” Gregoire said, looking around the expanse of lawn for some explanation for what had happened before he had arrived. “Where are the agents?”

Arris shook his head. “They didn’t make it.”

Gregoire nodded toward the collapsed, smoldering structure on the side of the low mountain on the opposite side of the lawn. “What the hell happened here?”

Arris shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me,” Arris said, hooking a thumb at Nereika. “Maybe she could explain it to you better.”

Gregoire turned to the girl. “She’s hurt!”

He bent down on one knee near the girl and lowered his weapon to the ground, pulling a small medical kit from a cargo pouch on his combat harness. He moved the girl’s hands from her stomach and looked up at her.

“Come, lay down, and let me take a look at your wound.”

Nereika looked to Arris for guidance, and he nodded to her that everything was okay. Gregoire pulled a small flashlight out of another pouch and handed it to Arris.

“Shine this here for me,” he said, tearing a large opening in Nereika’s robe, exposing the gunshot. The hole was barely oozing blood, the opposite of what should be happening. Indeed, she should not have been able to be standing with the ease she had been, now that Gregoire could see the extent of the damage. Not to mention the excruciating pain she should be feeling.

He tore open a QuickClot packet and pressed the dressing to the wound, although he wasn’t sure the girl needed the clotting-agent-impregnated bandage. “Who shot you?”

“He did,” she said, staring over at Arris.

“That’s true,” Arris said. “I’ll tell you when we get back home; I’m going to need a couple of drinks to process this -“ he looked around “- episode. It’s been a strange couple of days.”

Arris turned and began walking across the lawn toward the ruins of the mansion, playing the flashlight beam off the divots in the grass. Truly spectacular, whatever it had been that caused this damage, Arris thought. Beams of light. He turned half-way through the lawn and retrieved the black sword from the ground, pulling it up and examining the small gem the pommel. It was dark. He tapped it with the butt of the flashlight and nothing happened. He shrugged.

He slipped the sword under his belt and climbed up the rubble where the main entrance to the building had been and shined the flashlight beam down into the hole where the foyer had been. There was a perfectly carved semi-sphere in the ground, partly filled with remnants of the mansion. He played the beam through it until it refracted in the bottom, the crystal Onorien had used giving off as scattering of colors and glinting wildly. Arris stepped down to the bottom of the hole and picked up the crystal and then glanced at the gem in the handle of the sword. Nothing.

Arris held the crystal up before him at arm’s length and said, “Abracadabra.”

Nothing. Arris smiled at himself. Faith? He had none, especially not in his ability to make the crystal come to life as Onorien had. He slipped the crystal into his pocket and walked out of the hole back toward Gregoire and Nereika.

Gregoire hooked a thumb at the smoldering structure on the side of the mountain. “What was that?”

“A mansion,” Arris said, “a very large, very weird mansion. We’re going to need to get her to a hospital, and I’d like to get the hell off this island. Where’s your boat?”

Chapter 43

Gregoire and Arris stood in the hallway of the University of Miami Hospital, watching a pair of police officers walk away. Gregoire and Arris regarded each other with curiosity as the two beat cops turned a corner.

“Your daughter?”

Arris shrugged. “She has no passport, no ID, no bank accounts, no anything as far as I know, so she has to become somebody, so why not my daughter? It’s the only way we’re going to be able to get her out of here, too.”

“Get her out of here to where?”

“Just thinking off the top of my head, I was figuring she could recover at my house until she’s well enough to do whatever it is she’s going to do now that she’s off that island.”

“How are you going to get her to your house? That’s just crazy, Dave,” Gregoire said, looking around to ensure nobody was listening. “You should just leave her here and let the authorities deal with her.”

Arris shook his head. “I’ve already got Dietrich working on the transfer papers and getting me some identification to prove she’s my daughter. We should be able to get her on the transport with us tomorrow morning: the wound is remarkably stable, so she should be able to travel.”

“What are you going to tell Dale?” Gregoire asked.

Dale Singer was their boss, the owner of the company for which they worked. Arris thought about it for a moment: Nereika wasn’t the first person he had brought out of a danger zone without prior authorization. Gregoire was. Arris looked at Gregoire for a long moment, briefly remembering the day in Africa years earlier when he had pulled Gregoire from certain death and brought him to America and, eventually, the company. Dale would understand, in time, again.

“Nothing. Not about her, anyway, not about the island,” Arris said. “Not yet, at least.”

“What did happen on that island?”

Chapter 44

Arris and Gregoire sat on the back deck of Arris’ house, a three-quarters-drained bottle of Lagavulin Scotch on the table between them. Arris lit a cigarette, pondered the US Special Forces emblem on the Zippo lighter and dropped it onto the table, exhaling a cloud of smoke into the night air. The two men stared at the black sword and crystal lying on the table.

“That couldn’t have really happened,” Gregoire said, turning a cigar in his fingers, his mind agog.

“I agree. It couldn’t have, but it did,” Arris said.

“But it doesn’t make any sense, Dave, not on any level imaginable. I followed one of the boats connected to the drug dealers we were after, and it went to the island you were on,” Gregoire said. “What kind of connection could that be?”

“I dunno, but it sounded like a weird boat,” Arris said. “You sure you saw what you saw?”

Gregoire smiled broadly. “We saw some weird stuff the last few days.”

Arris reached across the table and took up the bottle of whisky, tipped a few fingers into each glass and set it down. He lifted his glass and took a meditative sip, turning his head up and staring into the stars of the night sky.

“That’s why you brought the girl back here, isn’t it?” Gregoire said. “You think she knows something?”

“She knows more about it than we do. Until a week ago, we didn’t know anything about whatever this is, and now I’ve seen it first hand, lived it. I watched a man get turned into a pile of ashes, Greg, by a man who uttered a word and pointed his fist. That’s not supposed to be possible,” Arris said.

“You think maybe it was the Bermuda Triangle at work?”

“The Bermuda Triangle?” Arris shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Doctor Onorien called it The Devil’s Triangle. I don’t know what to think, anymore. It’s almost like there’s a new world transposed over the one we know, only invisible to most people. I don’t think I was supposed to see it; or, at least, survive after having seen it.”

“Have you talked to the girl about it at all?”

“Just a little bit, before they moved her in here,” Arris said, motioning with his head toward a lighted bedroom window on the second floor of his house. “It doesn’t make any more sense than anything else, though. She says she was under some sort of spell for the last few years, that Doctor Onorien was training her as his apprentice while using her as a sex slave. She couldn’t do anything about it. She knew it was happening to her, but she was trapped inside her own body, helpless.

“Apparently, he would capture other natives from the jungle and perform tests on them, magic spells, if you can believe that. Other times, he would take her to Miami, where he had a house, and keep her locked up in it while he did whatever it was he did there. None of it really makes any sense.

“We might never know what the hell just happened to me on that island or what Doctor Onorien really was.”

They were silent for a moment, each pausing to smoke and sip from their tumblers. The sound of a manual transmission car could be heard from the street on the other side of Arris’ house, the driver working up through the gears after pulling away from a stop sign at a nearby intersection. Overhead, the pilot of a jet airliner bound for Los Angeles International Airport changed the power settings on his engines, the rumbling pitch of the turbines changing as he maneuvered the aircraft and prepared for final descent. The phone in the house in the lot behind Arris’ rang several times, and Arris watched the silhouette of his neighbor moving behind her curtains as she made her way to the handset base.

“What are you going to do about her?” Gregoire asked.

Arris looked up at the lighted room and then motioned to a brick structure at the back of his lot, a small garage-like building with a door and several windows.

“I’m going to fix up the garden house,” Arris said. “It’s got heat and electric in it, so I figure I’ll just turn it into an apartment for her, give her a place to live where she can have some amount of privacy while we figure out what to do with her.”

“What about the – ” Gregoire said, lifting his hands and making a brief wiggle of his fingers as if he were a magician finishing a trick.

“I dunno, Greg, we’ll just have to see what happens next,” Arris said.

Arris tilted his glass into his mouth and felt the Scotch wash in over his tongue, fill his cheeks. He held it there, savoring the peat and the salt water marsh, concentrating all his senses on the reality of the whisky. He knew, now, that there was another purpose available for his life, one that didn’t involve movie actors or terrorist cells, one that didn’t concern the vague national security concerns of whatever administration ran the government. There was a new world out there, a divine world, one hidden by shadows and in the pauses of gusts of wind, a world that could make his life mean something, a challenge to make living worthwhile.

He took a drag from his cigarette, held it tight in his lungs, then spilled the smoke up into the night air in a slow, steady stream, “If there’s one thing that seems certain, something else  is going to happen.”

EPILOGUE

Onorien stared up at the ceiling of the foyer, the pain in his arm and abdomen more severe than any he had ever felt in his life. He was also empty in a way he had never known, every ounce of his faith in himself had been drained from his body. He had to concentrate. He had to focus. The blood in his mouth was a constant reminder of his peril, of his impending doom. Of his looming death. How had this man Arris broken free from the Restraint Spell?

Concentrate. Have faith. Focus on the possible.

He could hear his mansion being shredded by The Prismatic Maelstrom, a spell on which he had spent decades working, trying to bring to life, the spell that would give him the upper hand over his foes. And now, in his hour of triumph, in the moment he was finally able to activate it, a simpleton unbeliever from the outside world ruined it with two strokes from a Divine Blade. How?

Although there was a problem: the spell should have ended when the crystal fell from his hand. And, yet, it hadn’t. He could see the tendrils of light separating into additional colors of the spectrum, each new beam whipping out and destroying what it touched. It was only a matter of time until everything became nothing. So, clearly, the spell was not perfected.

The pain in his gut was monumental, a searing, tearing and almost poisonous feeling; he could feel his strength seeping from his body along with the determination of his mind. And then the room flashed with a pulse of white light so bright it forced his eyes closed with pain. This was not how it was supposed to end, he thought, as he heard the walls of his mansion buckle and collapse. Concentrate.

He opened his eyes to see the fool above him, the man’s eyes searching for comprehension, for understanding. If he could have, Onorien would have laughed at him in contempt, but the severed muscles in his arm and the puncture in his gut prevented any mirth. And then the simpleton spoke to him.

“Can you turn that thing off?”

Fool. Idiot. Interloper. Onorien could feel his blood seeping into the fabric of his robe, taste the alkaline on his tongue, and knew he had very little time left. His robe’s power was flickering out. It would be now or never.

He stared back up at Arris blankly, once again returning deep into his own mind, blocking out the sights and sounds of the world around him, knowing only his faith could get him out of his predicament. Faith in himself. Faith in the world. Faith in the universe. Faith in the Divine World. Vaguely, he could hear the footfalls of Arris as the man ran away down the hallway, fleeing the collapsing mansion. Onorien took another breath, calmed himself with it, and focused on all the motions of his body, inhaling the air from the world, knowing in his soul the power of the world. He opened his eyes and envisioned where he had to be:

“Transporto!”

And he was gone.

*****

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He has never held a single job for more than three years, although his career as a newspaper reporter spanned more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.

The Divine World is the first in a series.

*****

Original Short Story Version

Author’s Note: This is the original short story that is the genesis of this novel. I wrote it as the final short for a first year fiction writing class while studying at the University of Pittsburgh. I got the idea for the story while walking around the Oakland district of Pittsburgh and wondering what I should write my final short about, and then just started randomly associating words until I came up with the title of this short. With the title in mind, I came up with this tale, based on a character I had been drawing in my sketch pads since I was in high school. I guess I always wanted to find out what he was up to.

Within the Prismatic Maelstrom

David Arris floated helplessly on the waves, staring up at the sky as it slowly worked its way through the blue spectrum toward dusk. The ocean water lapped continuously over his inflatable life jacket, occasionally spraying his face with saltwater. In the moments when he wasn't thinking of sheer survival, of staying afloat, he cursed himself for thinking it was all supposed to be some easy money: just fly some Drug Enforcement Agents so they could shadow a suspected cocaine speedboat. That had lasted all of fifteen minutes before the Stinger missile sliced through the engine cowling of his helicopter, the only miracle being it didn't explode on impact as designed, and sent him and his two passengers into the Caribbean.

The sky was slowly melting from blue to black when Arris saw the silhouette of an island slowly drifting over the horizon toward him. Beneath the water, his legs could feel the pull of the current as it aimed him at the island like a malicious hand testing the weight of a stone before hurling it. The last rays of purple light were bleeding from the sky when his feet brushed the ocean floor 50 yards off shore of the island. He began to paddle toward shore until the water level had dropped down to his knees and he trudged up to the beach, stumbling the last ten yards to shore and collapsing onto the sand.

A sudden burst of light sliced through his eyelids and made him squint despite his closed eyes. The sand beneath him had transformed: It was soft and pillowy. He opened his eyes, using his arm to block the rays of light assaulting them. Everything was bathed in yellow as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the sunlight streaming into them.

"Good morning, Mr. Arris," a voice said from the brightness to his left. "Don't be alarmed, some locals found you washed up on the shore and were fearful something wild might get you during the night so they brought you to me.”

Arris rubbed his eyes, dispelling the illusory effect of over-brightness, and focused on the speaker, a tall thin man with jet black hair and a hook nose. He had a thin, Machiavellian face and the fit build of man who exercised often, even if he did appear to be in his late fifties or early sixties.

"Where am I? " Arris asked, "and how do you know who I am ... and who are you?"

The man smiled slightly, as if he had anticipated the questions and had a prepared statement on hand to answer them.

"You are in the guest bedroom of my mansion on the island of Deltravetas. I examined the identification in your wallet which said that you are Mr. David Arris from Washington, D.C., and I," he paused slightly for effect, "I am Doctor Konrad Onorien."

Arris rubbed the stubble on his chin thoughtfully, pleased to have ended up in a bed and not at the bottom of the ocean. He swung his feet from under the bed coverings and stretched his legs. Arris quickly scanned the room and then its owner and concluded that Dr. Onorien was a wealthy man. Peculiarly wealthy, Arris thought, as he looked at the dark-maroon velvet smoking jacket and the white ascot tied underneath the blue silk shirt Onorien was wearing, not the kind of wardrobe a man normally wears on a tropical island.

Arris was sitting on was a brass canopy bed with white mosquito netting, the walls were paneled with walnut and a brick fireplace stood in one corner of the room with white maple logs stacked in a neat pyramid to the side. Through the glass doors that led to a balcony he could see the emerald green canopy of the tropical forest that hugged the island's jagged interior landscape, and beyond he could see the sapphire ocean that stretched out toward infinity and mixed with the azure sky.

"Lunch will be served at noon, Mr. Arris," Onorien said, breaking the momentary silence which had filled the room. "Since there will not be transportation from the island until the next supply helicopter arrives, you should consider yourself my guest."

"Thank you, very much," Arris replied. "When will that be?"

"It should be here on Saturday," Onorien said, "and the crew usually stays the night before leaving."

Arris looked up at him and drew a breath, "Would you mind telling me what day it is now?"

"It is Thursday, Mr. Arris," Onorien replied, looking thoughtfully down at him. "One thing, however. If you decide to wander off the estate before you leave, I advise you to be extremely careful of the jungle -- not all of the locals here are as friendly as the ones who picked you up. Please tell me beforehand when you plan to go out and how long you expect to be gone."

"OK, sure, thanks," Arris replied, watching Onorien disappear out the door and down the hallway.

Arris got off the bed and walked over to the balcony doors and looked out. Onorien's mansion was built on the side of a mountain, and jungle stretched for more than a mile in every direction away from the mansion. To his right, Arris could see the ocean about a mile away. On his left was the small mountain that formed the spine of the island, its full-bodied brown-black complexion giving Arris the impression that it was the sole reason the island stuck up out of the ocean.

He inhaled the air, caught the fresh, clean scent of the ocean within it, absent of the smoke and smog he was accustomed to think of as "fresh air" when outdoors in D.C. He turned and walked back into the room and noticed his clothes neatly folded on one of the chairs. He picked them up and noticed that they had been washed and ironed even though he had only been here overnight.

Arris dressed and left the room, heading in the direction he had last seen Onorien traveling. The hallway was as elegant as the bedroom, with ornate candelabras mounted to the walls at regular intervals instead of light bulbs from the ceiling, a seemingly impractical, if not quaint, throwback to the days before electricity or gas lamps. Then again, Arris thought, maybe there wasn’t any electricity on the island. The end of the hallway opened up to a large domed foyer, the staircase sweeping along the one wall as if it was meant to allow for grandiose entrances from above while guests waited below. Arris paused and took in the view below when a man dressed in a butler's suit emerged from one of the halls adjacent to the foyer and looked up. The man looked up at Arris curiously, as if the man was expecting Arris to say something or order a cocktail. Arris smiled politely and slowly descended the steps, watching the man turn and retreat down the hall. Arris got to the bottom and walked to the double doors, drew aside one of the curtains that hung to either side and  looked through the slit-window and across the well-groomed lawn surrounding the mansion. A hundred yards away he saw a jeep moving parallel to the fringe of the jungle. As he stared at the vehicle his attention caught on a plume of purple smoke that was slowly rising up out of the trees and melting into the breeze coming off the ocean. Arris stared at the smoke: What the hell makes purple smoke, he wondered?

He was just about to open the door when he felt another presence enter the room, the hairs on the back of his neck rising at the intrusion. He turned casually around and saw Onorien standing at the end of the other hallway leading from the foyer.

"Ah, good, so you have decided to come to lunch," he said. "If you will follow me, we can go to the back veranda now."

Without waiting for Arris to reply, Onorien turned and strode down the hall. As Arris followed him, he saw a variety of paintings lining the wall, all by artists famous enough for Arris to know their names, or at least know he had once heard the artist’s name. Arris watched in silent amazement as the strolled by them, uncertain why they were relegated to a hallway of no distinction.

"Do you like art, Mr. Arris?" Onorien asked, not turning his head but speaking loud enough for the words to float back to Arris..

"That depends on the painting. I'm no expert," Arris said.

"These are all originals, every one," Onorien said proudly. "I've spent quite a time collecting them -- Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Monet, Dali, Picasso. Would you like to see my display gallery after lunch? I've got more paintings there, as well as a collection of interesting artifacts and what-have-you."

"Yes, of course," Arris said, pausing slightly and looking at the signature on a painting of a lion and an angel staring over a balcony. It read "Magritte."

The veranda, as Onorien termed it, was quite a bit more than the name hinted. It extended off the back of the mansion over a shallow precipice, forming an "L" with the house and the cliff, extending along the edge of the cliff for about twenty yards and resembling a scenic overlook more than a backyard porch. A few feet from its cliff-side ending was a small waterfall that tumbled a few dozen feet into a shallow stream below. At the bottom of the waterfall a rainbow refracted from the mist-filled air, sending its spectrum in a gentle arc from the water to the nearby jungle.

"Impressive, is it not?" Onorien asked.

"Very. It must have cost you a fortune to build here. How did you find such a spot?"

"Just luck, actually," Onorien replied. "This mansion was the beginnings of a Spanish fortress which was never completed. Sometime in the late 1600s, Spain wanted to build a fortress here as a re-supply point to and from Mexico and Florida – Spain was going to build a series of them, actually, as protection against pirates and sudden storm fronts – but they abandoned it after a short while.

"Apparently, the garrison was overcome by disease or some such thing and died without getting word off the island as to their predicament. By the time a ship came by, it was too late, much too late, actually,” Onorien said casually. “The Spanish hadn’t correctly charted this island, and it was nearly a hundred years before another ship from a European country dropped anchor in the bay. And, oddly, they mis-plotted the island’s location, too. It wasn’t until 1895 that the island was finally put on a navigational map in its proper location.”

Arris was happily surprised when lunch turned out to be roast pheasant and a red wine that Onorien said was especially made for him by a vintner on the Moselle River in Germany. Arris tore into the food, acknowledging his hunger and his survival of a helicopter crash at sea by eating hurriedly, as if he had been away from food much longer than he had and was now reacquainting himself with its pleasures.

“Well, Doctor, how did you find your way here, if so many others found it so difficult?” Arris said between gulps of wine.

"My father died when I was seventeen as the result of a duel with the baron of Saxony," Onorien said.

"A duel?" Arris asked, " I thought that went out at the early nineteenth century?"

"In most places it did, but in Germany many of the so-called noble families still held to the old ways, and my father was one of them," Onorien said, sipping his wine and waving for his plate to be removed. "It became obvious to me that I should not stay, so I sold my father's estate and went to England to study chemistry and physics, which eventually led me to a medical degree.

"After several years of practice as a physician, I grew tired with life in London--indeed, with civilization as a whole--so I did what so many young European men with money do, and I began touring the world, working sometimes in clinics tending to the sick and poor in whatever country I happened to be in at the time, but mostly just absorbing the cultures of the world," Onorien said, obviously pleased at having someone to tell his story to. "For almost thirty years I moved around the world, staying for a year of two wherever it was the latest boat took me. I was working my way up from South America, intent on the United States but in no real hurry to get there, when I stumbled upon this abandoned Spanish fortress some years ago while sailing around the islands in search of some calling. Now, I help those who truly need my attention."

"Who, the natives?" Arris asked, feeling a twinge of political correctness about calling whoever inhabited the island 'natives.'

"Yes, actually," Onorien said, smiling slightly and draining his wine glass. "Come, let us go to my gallery."

The room could have easily have qualified as a medium-sized gallery by any city's standards, and Onorien took on the air of a museum guide as he began to show Arris around the room.

"This, Mr. Arris, is the original 'Man with the Golden Helmet' by Rembrandt," Onorien said proudly. "Fortunately, it was acquired by illicit means quite some time ago and I was able to get it for a steal," Onorien laughed slightly. "Perhaps you have heard that this paining was on display in the Berlin Museum? That one was identified as a forgery a number of years ago by experts -- though those fools actually think it was by an artist from the same period. This, the original, has been in my family’s collection for more than a hundred years, yet a counterfeit sat in a museum until recently, and now art historians are wondering what ever happened to the original and the police are trying to determine who could have stolen it. It never occurs to them they bought a fake in the first place."

Arris wondered about the explanation for a moment, wondered why Onorien would buy a stolen painting when he knew very few people other than himself would ever be able to see it. He forgot those thoughts when he saw a set-up of polearms from the middle-ages. Onorien saw Arris' attention shift and ushered him to the display.

"Are you familiar with the legends of King Arthur," Onorien inquired.

"Yeah, somewhat," Arris said, "I read some of them when I was a teenager."

"Good," Onorien said appreciatively, laying his hand upon a sword. "This sword here is Excalibur, the very one used by the supposed legend King Arthur."

Arris raised his eyebrows sharply at Onorien's strange explanation. Who would possibly claim to own the sword used by a mythical person? He looked down at the sword more closely despite himself, subconsciously wondering whether it really was THE sword. The silvery blade glinted in the light and he could make out his reflection amid the Celtic runes engraved on the side that faced him.

Arris caught Onorien's eyes, which were trained on him as if Onorien could hear his thoughts and was disappointed by the doubt in them. Onorien smiled wryly and led Arris over to another wall which was similarly bedecked with medieval weapons. Arris wondered where and why Onorien had gotten hold of them; it seemed strange that Onorien would have a display gallery that only he would ever see. He heard Onorien's voice and tuned into it in mid-sentence.

". . . and this dagger was one of the ones used to stab Caesar," Onorien said triumphantly, hoping to astound Arris with the news. "I'm still trying to find the one used by Brutus, but I can't quite locate it."

This guy's nuts, Arris thought, as he took the dagger from Onorien and looked at it.

Arris, not wanting to embarrass his host with his disbelief, inquired as to one particular sword with a jet-black blade and a plain hilt that seemed out of place with all the other "treasures."

"Ahh," Onorien said slowly, obviously satisfied that Arris had noticed it. "That is an odd weapon indeed. It was originally owned by a German baron in the early 1800's. He had the weapon specially made to combat the undead."

"Undead?" Arris asked, "What's that?"

"Undead, well," Onorien paused to consider the topic silently. "They're creatures that are neither alive nor dead; possessed bodies. A state of corpse limbo where the spirit is not there yet the body functions -- supernaturally, of course. You've heard of zombies, ghouls, vampires. . . that sort of stuff?"

"Yeah, in horror movies," Arris said.

"Well," Onorien continued," Baron Ewald von Hoth believed that he was being haunted by evil supernatural forces under the control of the Devil. He had this sword made from some metal he found in a meteorite -- he believed it had been sent by God to help him -- and was going to enter Hell and kill Satan with it.

"Unfortunately for the Baron," Onorien tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip, "he was found burned to death on an inverted Cross with the sword chained to his right wrist."

Arris thought about the story for a second. It would take a really desperate man to have a sword made to combat demons and bogeymen, a sword that would never be used due to the nature of the weapon -- to combat imaginary beings. Arris sighed to himself and followed Onorien around the room, listening attentively, although mostly disbelievingly, to the tales Onorien related about the other objects within the room.

Afterwards, Arris spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the grounds of the estate, all the while having the odd feeling that he was being watched both from the jungle and the mansion. For a moment, as he paused to admire the beauty of the jungle, he thought he saw a face among the trees: An ebony face with multi-colored paints streaked on it. The face, if it ever was there, was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

The gentle breeze that had been blowing stopped and the jungle noises abruptly changed to a deafening silence. He took several long steps backward, keeping his eyes on the treeline. He turned and briskly strode for the mansion, casting a quick glance over his shoulder every few strides to ensure that he wasn't being followed.

As he neared the front of the house he saw an abrupt flash of yellowish light erupt up past the roof from the veranda at the back of the house. At the same time he thought he heard a muted scream. As he wondered what was going on his stomach sank and the hairs on the back of his neck rose abruptly. He whirled around quickly, sure that there was someone sneaking up on him. For a bare second he thought he saw a man. A black man with a body streaked with paint and a feathered spear in his right hand. As soon as Arris caught the man's eyes he disappeared into the air. Again. Arris quickly walked to the house, frequently turning in circles to make sure that he wasn't being followed, certain that Onorien's tales of the supernatural had somehow gotten the better of him.

He yanked the door to the mansion open and briskly went in, quickly bolting the door behind him. He sat for a moment on the lowest step of the staircase, his hands trembling slightly. There was a person out there, he thought to himself, but where?

Arris busied himself in Onorien's library in the two hours remaining before dinner. The library had an odd feeling to it. It felt very enclosed despite the largeness of the room, giving Arris the impression that someone could sit reading for hours in and not even realize any time was passing.

Arris came across a shelf filled with books that seemed quite old. He pulled one off the shelf and examined it. The title stated "Lead and Gold" in plain black letters. He opened it and scanned the pages. Chemical formulas abounded. He crossed his eyebrows perplexedly and placed the odd book back on the shelf and pulled another one off. It was also about transforming lead into gold. The main point of the book, however, dealt with the employment of some device called the 'Philosopher's Stone,' some tool that apparently was the key to the process.

Arris felt a tap on his shoulder. He abruptly caught his breath and lifted slightly in his shoes with fright at the sudden intrusion. Onorien's butler had come to tell him that dinner was about to be served. Arris thanked him and looked at his watch: Where had the time gone? He got up from his chair and followed the butler down the hallways to the dining room.

Onorien was standing in a corner of the room talking with someone when Arris got there. The man didn't appear to be a servant as he was dressed in a dark purple cloak and pointing at some piece of paper that the two men were both holding. Onorien noticed Arris' arrival and the man hurried out of the room. Onorien smiled politely and walked over to Arris.

"I hope you had an enjoyable day, Mr. Arris," Onorien said warmly. "Dinner will be served shortly. In the meantime, may I offer you a drink?"

"Yes, thank you," Arris said, "a gin and tonic."

Onorien stepped over to a nearby cart laden with bottles and poured two drinks, handing one to Arris and keeping the other for himself.

"I've been meaning to ask you," Onorien said in a quite polite tone, "how did you end up on the beach last night? We don't often get visitors here, but when we do they usually come by more orthodox methods."

"Well," Arris said, stalling for time to create a lie in case Onorien was a front for the drug smugglers he had been after. "I was sailing my boat up to Puerto Rico when, somehow, I hit a reef that wasn't on my maps. My ship broke up and I just barely managed to grab a life preserver before it went down."

Arris took a swallow of his drink before continuing, smirking as he did so, "I guess it must be the 'Bermuda Triangle' or something."

Onorien smiled perceptibly and took a sip from his own drink.

"The Triangle does have a strong magic pull. I think it can be attributed to the heavy magical practices on Atlantis before it sank."

Arris resisted the urge to laugh at Onorien's magic interest and used the opportunity to press Onorien on the subject.

"You seem to have a lot of interest in magic, judging from your library, anyway, and  I was wondering what it's all about?"

"Do you believe in magic," Onorien responded.

"No. Well, it's all just sleight of hand, that's all."

"I see. I take it you've seen Houdini or Doug Henning," Onorien said distastefully. "People nowadays don't seem to consider magic as anything but card tricks and sawing people in half. They attribute everything to two categories: science or chance. If science can't explain it then it falls into the second area. Magic has been thrown out the window -- disavowed. But I tell you, magic can do anything science can do."

Arris wanted to change the subject, avoid allowing Onorien to humiliate himself. He knew, however, that he would have to hear him out.

"Do you know why the dark age alchemists were unable to transform lead into gold," Onorien asked, as if knowing what Arris had been reading in his library. "Because they didn't believe it could really be done. Too many calculations, not enough faith. I've done it, though. Hundreds of times.

"It's a shame when such a powerful art gets ignored because people don't understand it. They don't want to try to understand. It's much easier to show someone a mathematical formula and say 'that's how' than try to show them the actuality of it, but magic can't be shown in a proof, it must be experienced -- believed at face value," Onorien paused a moment before continuing. "I hate to think that the sole preservers of magic will be voodoo shamans. They're so primitive."

Just then a servant wheeled a cart of steaming food into the room. Onorien set his drink down and took his seat, motioning for Arris to do likewise.

"Do you mean to say that voodoo is for real? Tarot cards and all?" Arris asked.

"Of course it's real," Onorien said matter-of-factly, "no civilization would practice an art form that failed to work. No, indeed, it works quite well for its purposes. I have been trying to teach some of the islanders more sophisticated sorcery, but they seem unable to grasp much beyond the Fourth Dilentium."

"The what," Arris asked, astounded that Onorien seemed to have an entire history to his story.

"The Fourth Dilentium," Onorien said, pausing as the servant laid the food on the table, "is a stage of magical procession in which spells of similar power and complexity are grouped. There are nine known Dilentii altogether, ranging from simple cantrips to the Natural Incantations. I am presently trying to gain access to the Ninth Dilentium. It is difficult work, though, as I haven't found any spells of that power in any available lexicons and I haven't yet perfected the one I'm working on now."

Arris, unsure what to say, decided to ask about the native islanders, hoping to get away from the topic of magic and restore some sanity to the conversation.

"What're the natives like here. I could have sworn I caught one following me this afternoon but, when I looked, he disappeared."

Onorien creased his forehead disconcertingly. He seemed to resolve it and looked up at Arris.

"For the most part," he said, "they are simple fisherman and shell collectors. Some of them want to turn the island into a tourist resort. A smaller faction is trying to reassert the influence of voodoo over the populace, to return to the earlier, supposedly better, times.

"I had been helping the smaller faction in developing their powers until I realized that they were more interested in simple occult practices than thaumaturgic development. That's when I stopped helping them, I didn't want my craft to be twisted out of recognition."

Onorien looked down the table for a moment at Arris, pursing his lips and knitting his eyebrows. "You are Christian, are you not?"

"Yes, what does--" Arris started.

"Then you are familiar with the Bible and the 'Creation' story," Onorien continued. "In it, it says that man was created in God's image. God molded man after Himself, therefore making us each gods on a smaller level. God's power is, therefore, our power. If you can believe in a god who is all powerful, why not a man who has some of that power?

"I'm sure you are also familiar with the theory that religion was created to pacify the masses," Onorien continued. "But why? I'll tell you: Because rulers were fearful of the power of magic and the threat of it to their rule. They devised religion, in the sense we know it, as a counter to belief in magic. Why else would the Bible explicitly warn against the practice or belief in magic? There is only one reason: to sway people away from magic so that the rulers of the time could consolidate their power."

Arris took a drink from his wine glass. "Well, it's an interesting theory, but. . ."

"Ah, yes, I understand," Onorien chuckled, "perhaps we should change the subject before you think I am insane because of my hobby."

"Hobby?" Arris asked.

"Yes, how could a man of science as myself really believe in magic?" Onorien said, smiling unconvincingly. "It is easier to pretend you believe in magic than it is to actually believe in it. It also helps keep the "mad scientist" image among the natives so that they leave me alone. I do, however, know a few cardtricks."

Arris returned Onorien's smile weakly and turned his attention to the food in front of him. The rest of the meal was spent talking about Arris' life in the military and his college schooling, with Onorien adding anecdotes where appropriate. When dinner ended, Onorien excused himself saying that he had business to attend to and apologized that he would not see Arris until the next morning.

Arris spent the remaining hour of daylight sitting on the balcony outside his guest room and staring at the jungle, watching the different hues the sun emitted as it sank into the ocean. He wondered why Onorien would choose such a peaceful, out of the way island to live. If he really thought magic existed and wanted to preserve it, Arris reasoned, wouldn't he rather be near some large population center where he could teach other people?

Arris retreated from the balcony and headed for the library. He had been rummaging through he shelves for about an hour when he thought he heard a noise resembling a muffled scream. He scanned the room to see if there was someone else around but it was empty. He passed it off as just a floor board creaking under his weight.

Then he heard it again, only this time a faint smell of burnt ozone wafted through the room. He walked close to the walls, trying to find the scent's origin. As he slowly moved along the far wall from the door he felt a slight draft come from the bookcase.

He stared at it disbelievingly, passing his hand back and forth through the draft. No one hides secret passages behind bookshelves anymore, he thought as he slowly started pulling books out, looking for the catch mechanism. He was even more surprised when pulling a small thin book from the top shelf opened the portal.

The bookcase swung in to reveal a passage neatly hewn from the rock of the mountain. He hadn't thought about it before, but he realized that the mansion wasn't just built next to the mountain, but into it. He walked into the corridor, which was lighted by pine torches held in ornate braces, closing the bookcase as he entered.

He slowly crept down the tunnel, noting the several other passages connected to it and leading to other places in the house. As he neared the exit of the passage he slowed down and pressed himself up against the wall, not sure what he should do if he met somebody. He hugged the wall closely as he moved the last few yards to the opening, sure that his hushed breathing would give him away.

He peered through the opening into the cavern-like room beyond it. A flight of steps hugged the wall leading down from the corridor he hid in and the room was heavily cluttered on one end. The cluttered side was filled with boxes and wooden kegs; a large worktable was pressed against the wall and was covered with beakers and vials and other chemistry equipment. There were several shelving units near the desk, some containing large amounts of books while others had just small boxes or flasks.

Then his eye caught sight of the part of the cavern farthest from him. The floor seemed to be made from obsidian, the wall opposite him contrasted the black floor by the whiteness of its marble. On the floor was drawn a large hexagram in silver, with thirteen lit red candles surrounding it.

Standing in the center of the hexagram was a man robed in a black cloak, the hood had been thrown back and revealed his long scraggly white hair. A man clad in dark purple stood about ten feet behind him and was writing something down. Opposite the two men on the wall was a black man held to the wall by heavy iron chains clamped to his wrists and ankles.

The man on the wall was sobbing softly, the blood running down his arms evidence of his struggle to free himself. Arris' eyes bugged out with astonishment at the scene. He wondered who these men were and what they were going to do, and why they were doing it. The black-clad man was gesturing and moving his arms in odd motions, stopping once in a while to cast some powder into the air and Arris could hear a lilting voice reciting something in a language that resembled a cross between Latin and Arabic.

The man on the wall looked around the room pathetically and then caught sight of Arris in the passage. The man looked pleadingly up at him, his eyes begging for rescue. Arris tried to sink deeper into the shadow he was in, hoping the man would consider him a hallucination. The man, however, thrashed more violently in his manacles and screamed out.

The two men whirled abruptly, the one in purple quickly produced a dagger from his robe and moved to the foot of the stairs. The white-haired man strode over to the younger man's position and looked up at Arris.

"Mr. Arris," the man said and shook his head disparagingly. "I'm sorry you had to see this, now; I was hoping to surprise you later. Please, do not hide."

Arris eyed the two men and stepped into full view, his mind racing for a solution to his dilemma.

"I was hoping to test a normal person's resistance to spells," the man said, "but I didn't want to test you for another day, not until I had perfected 'the Maelstrom'."

Arris scanned the room, the man's statement not registering as sense in his mind. "Where is Doctor Onorien," Arris asked. He thought he already knew the answer but refused to believe it.

The white-haired man chuckled softly, "I, Mr. Arris, am Onorien." He gestured to the other man in the room, "This is my assistant, Arlet. You have interrupted a test of my new spell. I do not like to be interrupted."

"Spell? You're serious about all that magic bunk," Arris said.

"Yes. Wouldn't you rather believe I'm insane, though? I see you need a lesson in necromancy," Onorien said. "Watch ... and believe."

With that, Onorien turned in his spot and quickly uttered a series of foreign words and pointed his fist at the man on the wall. A burst of fire erupted from his arm and flashed towards the manacled man. The man screamed shortly as the fireball turned his body into a mass of charred flesh. Onorien spun in his spot and laughed sarcastically at Arris.

"Bunk," he said, "perhaps it's time you experience magic -- firsthand. Arlet, fetch him."

The purple clothed man quickly sprang toward the stairs after Arris. Arris turned and sprinted down the hallway, racing for the square of light outlining the secret door at the end of the tunnel. He yanked the door open and slammed it shut behind him, barely making it ten feet into the room before the bookcase exploded and showered the room with burning embers, the shockwave knocking him to the floor.

Arris picked himself up and raced out of the library into the adjoining hallway, trying to picture the way out of the mansion, and smashed headlong into the butler.

"Quick," Arris sputtered, "how do we get out of here? Onorien's gone mad."

The butler smiled sardonically and produced a revolver from inside his jacket, training it carefully on Arris.

"So, Mr. Arris, this chase is ended," Arlet's voice said from down the hallway.

"I've got him here," the butler said, looking triumphantly down the hall at Arlet.

Arris quickly kicked up at the gun, knocking it from the butler's hands and down the hall behind him. The butler turned towards the weapon and Arris kicked his knees, tripping him to the floor. Arris sprinted down the hall, ignoring Arlet's scream for him to remain where he was, turned several corners and stopped in a hallway ending in a door. Footsteps beat closer from further down the corridor so he wrenched the door open.

It was the display gallery. Arris scanned the room quickly for a window, but was tackled from behind before he could start to it. He twisted in the man's grasp and broke Arlet's hold, rolling from the floor to his feet. Arlet pulled a knife from the folds of his robe and jabbed at him jerkily. Arris deftly side-stepped the lunge, caught Arlet's arm at the wrist and elbow and drove his knee upward into Arlet's arm. Arlet screamed loudly and the knife popped out of his hand and clattered on the floor.

Arris twisted Arlet's arm violently behind him and punched a sharp blow to the small of his back. Arlet fell to the ground and quickly rolled over, thrusting his feet into Arris' stomach and sending him crashing into a vase stand near the wall. Arris watched as Arlet scrabbled for his weapon and began to stand up.  Arris noticed the ancient Roman dagger on the wall, grabbed it, and whirled it into Arlet's shoulder. Arris watched for a second as Arlet fumbled through his robes and began to chant. Arris grabbed Onorien's "Excalibur" from its stand and headed for the young thaumaturg.

Before he covered the distance, however, he was thrown to the far wall and the sword stripped from his hands by some invisible force. Onorien stood in the doorway with a hand pointing at him.

"What the hell," Arris said as he struggled to his feet.

"I can't very well let you leave now," Onorien replied, "if the outside world finds out about me before I'm ready I could be ruined. No, I won't have that. I have planned too long to allow anyone to disrupt my schedule. You shall have to be dealt with."

"Plan? What plan?" Arris asked, his mind whirling as it tried to piece together some semblance of reality as he remembered it.

Onorien looked at him sternly, "Everybody wants to rule the world, Mr. Arris. I shall."

Arris was about to reply but was cut off before he could by the hurried entrance of the butler.

"Onorien," he blurted out pathetically, "the natives have killed the guards and are in the mansion."

Onorien frowned and looked over at Arlet, who was struggling to his feet. "Arlet, you take care of the natives; I'll deal with Mr. Arris."

Arlet looked fearfully at Onorien, slowly nodded and trudged away, tossing the Roman dagger to the floor near Onorien and signaling for the butler to follow.

"Well, Mr. Arris," Onorien said and shook his head, "some times things just don't go as planned. What a fortunate day to put my powers to the test."

Onorien produced a small object and placed it on the floor in front of him where he crushed it underfoot. A flow of strange words poured from his mouth for a few seconds. Arris tried to run but found that he was being pressed to the wall by some force. He could slide along the wall but could not move away from it.

Onorien smiled wryly and pulled a piece of glass resembling a prism from his robe. He pulled a packet of something from another fold in his robe and squeezed the contents onto the prism. He rubbed the fluid over the object, began reciting some gibberish, and moved the object through the air in front of him.

Arris watched uncertainly, fearfully. He slowly moved along the wall in an attempt to get away from the sorcerer, wondering what kind of spell required such a long incantation as he listened to the words. Spell? He couldn't believe in the reality of his situation -- real wizards casting real spells in a real world. It just wasn't supposed to happen. It just couldn't be true.

He heard the sounds of a struggle growing nearer from down the hall and wondered what was going on. He heard several gunshots and then an agonized scream. Just then the air in the room began to move slowly past him, the area in front of Onorien shimmering colorfully as Arris made out faint rays of light coming from Onorien's prism. As the colors grew more solid the wind in the room picked up speed, revolving around the forming patch of colors in front of Onorien. A vortex formed in the air, the colors from the prism mixing in the center and slowly filtering out as the whirlpool of light grew larger.

Arlet, bleeding from several wounds, suddenly appeared behind Onorien in the hallway. He was about to enter the room when an arrow pierced his neck and Arlet collapsed to the ground, dead. Arris moved more quickly along the wall as he slid further from Onorien. He turned and saw the black sword, the emerald set in the pommel glowing green. He reached for the weapon and cast a glance at Onorien.

Onorien had come out of his spell-trance and was smiling wickedly. In the hallway a black man streaked with warpaints appeared, menacing Onorien with a feathered spear. He stared momentarily at Onorien and then lifted his weapon. Too late.

Onorien turned the storm of light on the man and engulfed him. The native barely had time to start a scream as the vortex caught his body and dissolved it into the air. Arris quickly grabbed the black blade from the wall and was surprised to find that it dispelled the invisible field in front of him on contact.

He stumbled from the wall into the center of the room, holding the sword in front of him. Onorien didn't notice him as he made his way towards the wizard. Onorien brought the maelstrom laterally across the room, blasting the intervening wall to rubble and exposing more natives in the hallway. They were paralyzed with fear and only watched the whirlpool as it quickly closed in on them and evaporated the first two men in its path.

The storm seemed to grow in intensity the more it destroyed, the wind whipping about faster as it demolished more. The sides of the hallways and the rest of the opposite wall burst to pieces and melted into the color stream. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. They swirled and annihilated everything as Onorien advanced on the remaining natives. One was trying to cast spells of his own, but was too frightened of the coming storm to concentrate hard enough and kept stopping midway through an incantation.

Arris charged Onorien, bringing the sword back like a baseball bat. Onorien's head turned to face him and he saw the black sword in his hands. Onorien brought his hands around toward Arris but the storm trailed along much more slowly, ponderously decimating all that it touched.

The black blade cut through the wizard's robes and bit several inches into his side, throwing him against the wall and causing him to drop the prism. Arris raised the sword and brought it back down on the sorcerer, cutting deeply into his shoulder and slicing through bone. The wizard uttered a gurgled scream and slumped to the floor. Arris caught sight of the storm, now out of control and whipping about furiously, and wondered if it had been wise to attack Onorien before having him bring the fury to a halt. A red tongue of light licked out at him but he dispelled it with a quick parry. The storm was quickly filling up the room, threatening not only its creator but him as well.  Arris caught sight of a window and raced for it, leaving the wrecked wizard on the floor.

He could feel the intensity of the wind blowing through the room, see the maelstrom expanding with everything it destroyed. He heaved the sword through the window first, shattering the large panes into crystal splinters, and followed an instant behind it as the tempest filled the room and obliterated it. He fell to the ground outside and rolled down the short slope leading from the house.

He looked up at the mansion and saw the prismatic rays shooting from the window. Below the window' he saw the black sword stuck into the ground by its blade, resembling a cross. He got up and ran along a road that to led to the beach. He stopped running about a half-mile from the mansion and looked back to where the mansion was. Rays of color sprouted up into the sky and faded into the darkness and the howl of the wind was now dying down to a whisper. He wondered what would be left of the mansion to substantiate what had just happened. No one would believe a story like that without proof, it was just too absurd.

He shrugged his shoulders and started walking, wishing he had salvaged something: The black sword, that would be proof. Or would it have been? Someone would probably have been able to explain it scientifically one way or another. He let these thoughts wander through his mind until they, too, faded into the sky as he gazed up and admired the stars for their seeming simplicity.

*****

Television Pilot Episode

Author’s Note: Years after writing the short story, I wondered about how to revive David Arris as a character, a character I’d thought about long and hard for many years. I was certain there was a story arc to tell about this man and his brief introduction to the hidden magical side of reality. Finally, I struck upon the idea of turning the first short into a television pilot episode for a series that would be a supernatural action-adventure romp.

THE DIVINE WORLD

By William Young

(PILOT) “WITHIN THE PRISMATIC MAELSTROM”

TEASER

FADE IN TO:

EXT. MORNING – ESTABLISHING - MILITARY STAGING BASE

EXT. MORNING – JUNGLE HELICOPTER LZ

DAVID ARRIS is finishing the pre-flight of a UH-1 helicopter, painted as a tourist sight-seeing air service. Arris is in his late 30s, physically fit with a calm, firm presence. Beyond the helicopter pad area is a set up of tents and shanty buildings. Men in vaguely-military uniforms walk around performing their tasks. GREGOIRE, also late 30s, French, wirily built, wearing military cargo pants and a light colored linen shirt, walks up to the aircraft, kicks the skid, and looks to Arris.

GREGOIRE

You know, the next time they offer to send me to the Caribbean, I’m not going to jump at the chance.

(off helicopter)

This thing gonna fly?

ARRIS

(quickly)

It’s a Huey, Greg. Of course it’ll fly.

GREGOIRE

Well, I must finish preparations with the insertion team. Go get ‘em.

Gregoire walks off toward a collection of tents. Arris walks to the pilot’s seat and tosses his checklist onto it. Two men wearing dark jackets with DEA stenciled on the back walk up to the aircraft. Arris nods.

AGENT 1

We ready to go?

ARRIS

Yep.

AGENT 2

Let’s go.

Agent 2 hands ARRIS a map and we see several areas circled and a projected flight path drawn.

EXT. DAY – IN THE AIR OVER THE OCEAN

The helicopter is flying over the ocean toward some islands on the horizon. In the distance we see a medium-sized boat moving quickly on the water. Inside the helicopter, the two agents point at it and Agent 1 lifts binoculars. Agent 2 taps Arris on the shoulder and points through the windscreen, then clicks the button activating his headset.

AGENT 2

We need to make a looping arc around to the other side so they don’t think we’re trying to follow them.

EXT. DAY – REAR OF THE DRUG BOAT

A man is looking through binoculars at the helicopter, scrutinizing the logo painted on the door. The man notices someone inside the helicopter looking through binoculars and turns.

The man waves and points to sea, and the boat changes direction and accelerates.

EXT. DAY – INSIDE THE HELICOPTER

The agents look at each other in confusion. Arris continues toward the island.

AGENT 1

(into mic)

We need to follow that boat and find out where it’s going.

ARRIS

I can’t hide in mid-air, you know.

AGENT 1

(puts binoculars to face)

Oh, Christ.

EXT. DAY – REAR OF BOAT

A man walks through a door with a Redeye shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, aims at the helicopter and fires. In the distance the helicopter is turning quickly. The missile rips through the air, trailing smoke.

INT. DAY – INSIDE HELICOPTER

The Agents stare at the smoke plume as it gets closer. Arris moves the controls and presses the chaff and flare buttons on the collective stick. Arris turns the aircraft and looks out his door window. He reacts: nothing is coming from the box on the rear of the helicopter.

ARRIS

(into mic)

This is going to be loud and full of fire. Hold on.

The missile pierces the side of the helicopter, atomizes one of the agents, and rips through the other door, sucking the agent and the door into mid-air where they fall to the sea. The aircraft rocks violently in the air and Arris tries to regain control.

ARRIS

A dud.

Arris turns to the passenger cabin and sees it’s empty, save for body parts and blood. The MASTER CAUTION light flicks on, followed by several system specific caution lights. The camera pans across the control panel to the RPM indicator, which suddenly falls off accompanied by the silencing of the engine. Arris slams the collective down, pushes the left pedal forward, adjusts the airspeed and rolls the throttle off.

ARRIS

Mayday, mayday, this in Uniform Tango Four two miles southwest of-

(briefly searches for map with eyes)

- some island and going down in the sea. Mayday mayday.

Arris looks out the window at the tuft of island on the horizon as he glides the helicopter toward the water and crash lands it. As it sinks, he climbs out and swims away from the craft. He inflates his life vest and looks around at the vast amount of water.

FADE OUT:

END OF TEASER

ACT ONE

FADE IN TO:

EXT. DAY – MILITARY STAGING BASE

EXT. DAY – JUNGLE LZ

Gregoire walks into a control tent filled with radios and agents.

GREGOIRE

Well?

AGENT 3

Nothing yet.

GREGOIRE

Was there a distress call?

AGENT 3

No.

GREGOIRE

Did it land somewhere?

AGENT 3

Nobody knows.

GREGOIRE

Did anybody on the ground report seeing anything happen?

AGENT 3

No. But, we haven’t talked to anybody other than ATC, and they didn’t hear any radio reports or see anything on radar.

GREGOIRE

How many boats do we have?

AGENT 3

Three.

GREGOIRE

Well, let’s crew them and start checking the area of the flight plan. There are a lot of little islands out there, they could be on one.

EXT. NIGHT – WATER’S EDGE

Arris trudges through low waves toward the beach, takes a couple of steps up away from the tideline, and collapses to the sand.

INT. MORNING –BEDROOM

Arris wakes on a large canopy bed in a large room. The room is lavishly appointed. He gets out of the bed and walks across the room to an outdoor-opening door. He is dressed in linen pajamas. He pulls the door open and walks out onto a small veranda. He looks around and realizes he is in a large stone mansion built into the side of a cliff on a small mountain of rock near the center of the island. He can see the ocean off in the distance, beyond the jungle canopy. There are only the sounds of nature. He smiles to himself.

ONORIEN (O.S.)

Ahh, you’re awake.

ARRIS

(turns, off room)

I hope this is one of those all-inclusive resorts.

Arris walks into the room where he confronts DR. KONRAD ONORIEN, a man in his mid-50s and dressed in khaki pants, a white shirt, yellow ascot and blue jacket, an ensemble that more resembles a period piece from the past rather than modern clothing. Onorien bows ever-so-slightly.

ONORIEN

This is my home. Welcome.

Arris moves forward and proffers a hand; Onorien doesn’t even consider shaking and Arris lowers his hand quickly.

ARRIS

David Arris.

ONORIEN

Dr. Konrad Onorien.

(a beat)

Breakfast will be served shortly; I hope you are hungry.

ARRIS

Starved, actually.

ONORIEN

Some of the natives found you on the beach, apparently washed ashore last

evening. But, please, we’ll talk more over breakfast.

(off table)

I had your clothes washed, and you’ll find a washcloset through the door in the corner.

Onorien turns and leaves. Arris gives the departing Onorien a vague look of uncomprehension and checks the pile of his clothing quickly. Then he walks back to the veranda and scans the horizon.

ARRIS

Natives, huh?

INT. MORNING – CORRIDOR - CONTINUOUS

Arris is walking down a hall from his room. On the way, he notices paintings and artwork and curio tables with oddities on them. He passes many doors, all closed, and comes to the top of a spiral staircase. He looks at the wooden banister and raps it with his fingers.

ARRIS

Solid.

(notices a woman at the bottom of the stairs)

I wasn’t going to slide down. Honest.

A flicker of a smile from the woman, in her late teens or early 20s, a light-skinned black with green eyes. Stunning. Arris descends.

ARRIS

I’m David Arris.

NEREIKA

(nods)

Nereika.

(a beat, watching him descend)

You brought us the rare bit of excitement last night, Mr. Arris.

ARRIS

Oh? How’s that?

The two begin walking.

NEREIKA

We don’t often get people washing up on the beach.

ARRIS

But you do get that?

(a tiny beat)

Now, that’s surprising.

NEREIKA

(tiny, short laugh)

No, actually, we’ve never had anyone wash up on shore. That’s what made it so exciting.

ARRIS

Oh, and what is it you do here?

Nereika flicks a curious, cautious glance at Arris.

NEREIKA

I’m Onorien’s personal-assistant–slash-understudy, I guess you could say.

ARRIS

Oh, no, I meant here on the island. I was looking out the window and didn’t see any signs of life or a city or … anything, really.

(playing up cheerfully)

I was kind of hoping this was a beach resort.

NEREIKA

Well, there are beaches.

ARRIS

I don’t suppose you have a plastic tub with spare swim trunks?

NEREIKA

(considers, slightly confused)

I … don’t believe that we do.

The two walk into a small, bright dining room. Onorien walks into the room, gestures to a side table filled with silver serving containers.

ONORIEN

Welcome to the island of Delta Vistas, Mr. Arris.

EXT. MORNING – BEACH

Gregoire is kneeling on the ground looking at a map. A man in uniform walks up to him and the two nod at each other.

GREGOIRE

Anything?

UNIFORM 1

Nothing.

GREGOIRE

What about the drug runners?

UNIFORM 1

No sign of them, either. Though, that’s not much of a surprise. The grass strip is about a half-mile inland from here, and if they got the shipment here on schedule, it would’ve gone out last night, long before we got here.

Gregoire looks back at the map and pulls a slender cigar from a flimsy box in his cargo pants, lights it. Ponders.

GREGOIRE

We’re going to find them if we have to check every island in the area.

(a beat)

And that could take long time. What’d the agency say about getting any aircraft?

UNIFORM 1

They’re on the way, now. Should be here before noon. One is coming here directly.

GREGOIRE

Okay, then I’ll take the boat and check the next island over. There’s an airstrip there, too. Maybe they made it there. Radio me when you’re in the air.

EXT. DAY – EXCLUSIVE ISLAND RESORT

Gregoire pilots the boat into a dock, hops out and ties it to the dock. A local dock official walks up to him and eyes the military equipment he’s wearing suspiciously.

DOCK WORKER

The dock is for registered guests, sir.

GREGOIRE

I’m sure it is. But you know what they say, any port in a storm.

The DOCK WORKER scans the skies for a second.

DOCK WORKER

The weather is excellent today, sir. Is there some way I can be of assistance?

GREGOIRE

Maybe. Is there an air strip on the island?

DOCK WORKER

Of course, sir. It’s how the guests arrive.

GREGOIRE

Where?

DOCK WORKER

About a kilometer inland, up this road.

GREGOIRE

You know if anybody landed at it recently?

DOCK WORKER

No.

(off the dock)

I work here.

GREGOIRE

(starts walking, the worker following)

I need to go there. You have transportation to it?

DOCK WORKER

Of course, but you must be a guest of the resort to –

GREGOIRE

Just tell me how to get there. I won’t be here that long. I just need to check something.

(pulls out a US government credit card and holds it toward the dock worker)

Check the tanks on my boat and fill them up while I’m gone.

EXT. DAY – ONORIEN’S ESTATE - CONTINUOUS

Onorien and Arris are walking the grounds outside the mansion.

ONORIEN

You can stay here at my mansion until the next supply vessel comes. Until then, feel free to explore the mansion, wander the grounds, whatever you need to pass the time.

I caution you about wandering too far from the grounds, though. Most of the island is uninhabited and wild jungle, but you’ll want to be careful of the natives, should you come in contact with them, which I wouldn’t advise.

ARRIS

Why’s that?

ONORIEN

They are the descendents of a Dutch slave ship that crashed off the island in the 1840s. They have lived fairly primitively since then.

However, they harbor some rather extreme grievances about their circumstances and, though they are of mixed blood, they have retained much of the culture and rituals of their African forbears and some are inclined to hostility against those of us of fairer complexions.

ARRIS

You’ve had problems with them?

ONORIEN

On occasion.

Arris surveys the grounds, scans the jungle line, looks back at the mansion and doesn’t like the prospects.

ARRIS

When’s the next supply ship arrive?

ONORIEN

Next Friday.

ARRIS

(suddenly remembering)

Oh, yeah, I should have had a survival vest with me when you found me last night. I’d like to get that back, if I could.

ONORIEN

What is a survival vest?

ARRIS

A nylon and mesh vest with a lot of pockets on it, each one containing survival equipment like a knife, flashlight, flares, and other stuff.

ONORIEN

You had no such vest last night. Perhaps the natives who brought you to me took that for themselves. Is it important, somehow?

ARRIS

Only to me. There’s a radio in it that could help me get out of here earlier if I could get a signal to anybody who’d be looking for me.

ONORIEN

There will be people looking?

ARRIS

Well, only for a little while.

(a beat, turns)

You know, you really should look into installing a phone or ham radio or something. Could come in handy during an emergency.

ONORIEN

I have phones and the Internet in my home in Florida. When I’m here, I want to be in total isolation.

ARRIS

Just tell me you have television.

ONORIEN

(smiles slightly)

No. But I have an excellent library.

INT. DAY – LIBRARY

Arris is scanning the spines of books in the library. It is large and lined with floor-to-ceiling-filled bookshelves. Arris has never heard of most of the titles and is reading their names off to himself. He takes a few more steps and scans a new bookshelf: “The Transmutation of Base Metals,” “Alchemy: Silver, Gold & Platinum,” “Forged Metals and the Divining Aspect,” and “The Importation of Divine Aspects into Inanimate Objects.”

NEREIKA (O.S)

Find anything interesting to read, Mr. Arris?

ARRIS

I think that’s going to be hard to do.

(off shelves)

Your boss has a lot of books but none of them seem to run in the beachchair thriller genre.

(a beat)

Anyway, I think I’m going to head down to the beach and see if I can’t find some of the stuff I should’ve come ashore with.

(a beat)

Care to join me?

EXT. DAY – BEACH - CONTINUOUS

Nereika and Arris emerge from the jungle onto the beach. Arris scans the beach.

ARRIS

Do you have any idea where I came ashore?

NEREIKA

No.

(a beat)

How did you come to be in the water? Doctor Onorien hasn’t gotten around to mentioning it, yet.

ARRIS

(momentarily curious at the disclosure)

Really?

I fly a helicopter tour around a handful of islands so honeymooners can see jungle waterfalls and other pretty things. I had engine problems and had to ditch.

NEREIKA

What about your tourists?

ARRIS

(a quick beat)

Nobody else was on board. I was on the way to pick some up when my helicopter decided it wasn’t going to fly anymore.

(surprised)

Hey, look at that.

Arris trots over to a portion of the beach where his survival vest sits, its contents strewn about wildly. He searches through the mess. He begins to move the vest and notices his ankle holster and pistol and recovers it with the vest. Nereika looks on, curious, not having seen the hint of a gun.

ARRIS

Well, what the heck were they looking for?

NEREIKA

This is your missing property?

ARRIS

Yeah. Only it’s not all here.

NEREIKA

No?

ARRIS

Yeah, no. No lightsticks, no fishing tackle, none of the survival food or matches. They took the mirror and the space blanket… and the compass.

(a beat)

Crap.

NEREIKA

What?

ARRIS

(holds up a disassembled radio)

What the heck would make them tear it open like this?

NEREIKA

Perhaps they thought it stored something inside.

ARRIS

Yeah, wires and circuits. You mean they’re really that primitive they’ve never seen a radio or anything like it?

Nereika nods and Arris tosses the radio aside.

ARRIS

(off the vest)

But this is the frickin’ Caribbean.

(turns to Nereika)

You don’t get visitors here?

NEREIKA

It’s a private island.

Nereika takes several paces away toward the jungle, suddenly concerned. While she’s not looking at Arris, he glances at Nereika’s back and quickly attaches the holster to his right ankle. Nereika turns over her shoulder at Arris while he stuffs his equipment back into the vest. She is nervous, and it shows.

ARRIS

(concerned)

What? Is there something I should know?

Nereika scans the jungle. Arris stands and walks to her.

ARRIS

Nereika, what is it?

NEREIKA

(turns quickly)

A trap.

Arris surveys the beach and jungle’s edge. All is quiet save for the sounds of nature. Then the beach erupts in bursts of small fireballs, aimed like ranging fire, some short of Arris and Nereika, some long or left or right. Arris is initially stunned and watches the fireworks display with a bit of awe and uncertainty, the tiny balls of fire little bigger than marbles and appearing in mid-air from nowhere, bursting and leaving tiny drifts of smoke.

NEREIKA

(points to the path through the jungle)

RUN!

Arris runs and Nereika follows. Arris hears all sorts of weird fireball and electrical bolt noises behind him and stops and turns, sees Nereika make a weird set of very quick motions. Nereika catches him watching.

NEREIKA

Run! Get to the estate grounds.

Arris runs down the path through the jungle and emerges on the well-kept lawn of Onorien’s estate. He bends toward his right ankle and thinks better of it as the sounds in the jungle subside.

Nereika bursts from the jungle and onto the lawn, turns and enters an odd defensive stance. Arris watches.

ARRIS

What the hell was that?

NEREIKA

That … that was the natives.

FADE OUT:

END OF ACT ONE

ACT TWO

FADE IN TO:

EXT. DAY – ONORIEN’S MANSION ESTATE

EXT. DAY – ONORIEN’S ESTATE GROUNDS

Arris and Nereika are standing at the edge of the lawn staring into the jungle.

ARRIS

That was the natives?

Nereika just stares at him.

ARRIS

All I saw were a bunch of little explosions. I thought these natives were primitive types?

NEREIKA

They are. Come on. I have to tell Onorien.

ARRIS

What would they have been shooting at us, because I didn’t hear any gunfire and that certainly wasn’t any kind of explosive device I’m familiar with, and I’m familiar with most of them.

Nereika brushes past Arris and strides across the lawn toward the mansion.

ARRIS

And how did you know it was a trap?

NEREIKA

I could just tell. I should’ve realized sooner that they had left your equipment strewn on the beach as a lure.

(a beat)

I don’t know what it was they were using.

INT. DAY – ONORIEN’S STUDY

Arris is with Onorien in the study, a large room with a big window facing a section of jungle on the other side of a narrow lawn. It is stuffed with books, paintings, bottles, and sundry archaic scientific devices of dubious uses.

ONORIEN

They call them laaien bols, Mr. Arris, the Dutch for, I believe, fire globes. They are small, parchment paper sacks filled with gunpowder and, usually, tiny pebbles or sharp bits of shale that they fire at you with a slingshot. They are more firework than dangerous, though enough of them could, I suppose, harm you.

It’s been quite a while, though, since they’ve bothered with us.

ARRIS

Any idea why they’d bother attacking at all, ever?

ONORIEN

(motions to his surroundings)

I have fair skin, and they believe I am here to oppress them, so I understand.

(a beat)

Anyway, I tried long ago to improve their circumstances, but they resisted and became hostile when they realized I was not here to free them from the island. I told them to leave if they wanted to, but I had come to stay, to improve the grounds of my ancestors. They resented that, having spent so long on the island in … captivity, I guess you could say. Since then, we’ve mostly kept to ourselves, with the odd exception like today.

(off vest)

You recovered your survival vest, so that must be a good thing.

ARRIS

Yeah, well, it’s something.

ONORIEN

If you want, we can discuss this further over dinner. Since I so rarely have guests here, I’m having my chef prepare a welcoming dinner that should, I hope, at least put your appetite at ease.

EXT. DAY – ISLAND GRASS STRIP

Gregoire is sneaking through underbrush. On the airstrip is the airplane his team was to have intercepted the day before, returned from its delivery. Gregoire looks through a small telescope at the plane and then scans the area nearby, noting the small knot of men near the plane. A pair of them detach from the group and walk toward a vehicle parked in a small lot near the small building that serves as the control tower/terminal.

Gregoire makes his way toward the building. At the edge of the jungle, he drops all his military equipment in the bushes, puts his pistol in his rear waistband, and walks casually up to the building. The men from the plane walk by and stop at the vehicle, and a man gets out.

All dialogue is in Spanish, subtitled on the screen, but understood by Gregoire, who speaks Spanish.

HEAD SMUGGLER

Well?

SMUGGLER 1

Not a problem.

HEAD SMUGGLER

(glances at Gregoire briefly)

I heard there was a problem.

SMUGGLER 1

The helicopter?

HEAD SMUGGLER

Yeah.

SMUGGLER 2

We took care of that problem. I saw some American agents posing as tourists in a sight-seeing helicopter.

SMUGGLER 1

Jose shot it down.

HEAD SMUGGLER

Pablo told me the missile was ineffective.

SMUGGLER 2

How? The helicopter crashed into the ocean, we all saw it.

HEAD SMUGGLER

He said the missile did not explode when it hit the helicopter.

SMUGGLER 1

Well, they are old missiles. What we need are Stingers.

Gregoire checks his watch, makes a throat noise to break the attention of the other men, and steps toward them.

GREGOIRE

(in French)

Excuse me, but is that the plane from Miami? I’m expecting a friend.

The smugglers all look at each other, befuddled.

HEAD SMUGGLER

(in Spanish)

Do you speak Spanish?

Gregoire looks confused and raises his hands slightly.

HEAD SMUGGLER

(in English)

Do you speak English

GREGOIRE

(in English, haltingly)

Yes, but my list of words is not so big.

HEAD SMUGGLER

What can I do for you?

GREGOIRE

I wait for the plane from Miami. Is this the plane? I wait for a friend who is coming in.

HEAD SMUGGLER

No, this plane is not from Miami. There are no passengers on it.

GREGOIRE

Merci. Thank you.

Gregoire turns and enters the building, looks around, sees a rear exit, and leaves through it. Outside, he looks around to see he’s not been followed, heads to the jungle and recovers his equipment. He walks a short way into the jungle and takes out a satellite phone. Dials.

GREGOIRE

They were shot down with a MANPAD by the smugglers.

Gregoire listens.

GREGOIRE (CONT’D)

No. Apparently they used a defective missile, probably an old Redeye or something laying around in somebody’s warehouse. Arris seems to have crash-landed the chopper in the water, which could mean anything

(listens)

But if Dave ditched it, I’m sure he got out.

INT. EVENING – DINING ROOM OF ONORIEN’S ESTATE

Nereika leads Arris into the room.

ONORIEN

Can I make you a drink, Mr. Arris?

ARRIS

How’s your martini?

ONORIEN

Nowhere near as good as Nereika’s.

(motions to Nereika)

Although I won’t give you the opportunity for comparison. How was your afternoon?

ARRIS

I spent it in your library trying to find something to read. You really need to work on your fiction selection. Dickens and dead Russians aren’t exactly the stuff you take to the beach.

ONORIEN

(pours self a drink)

I don’t read much fiction anymore. I find the newer writers less interesting than writers of old.

ARRIS

(off mansion)

So, what is this place?

ONORIEN

My retreat from the modern world. A place I can go to clear my head and concentrate.

ARRIS

You get much peace with neighbors like the ones you’ve got?

ONORIEN

They aren’t all like that, only a handful of them. Most of them, like the ones who brought you to me, are peaceful, ordinary people living out their normal lives on a tropical island.

ARRIS

Still…

ONORIEN

Even the malcontents pose no danger to you here. And they are little more than a trifle when I am out and about on the island.

Nereika returns and hands Arris his martini. She leaves.

ARRIS

How long have you been here on the island? This building is quite a structure.

ONORIEN

Yes, well, the island has been in my family for almost 200 years. The mansion was built in the late 1800s to replace a series of cottages that had been here.

ARRIS

It’s kinda big for just you and Nereika.

ONORIEN

There are a couple of others, staff, here as well. But, yes, it is large. Back when it was built, many from my family lived here. It has been mine alone for almost thirty years, my family having died out by then and leaving me the sole survivor.

ARRIS

You don’t have any family of your own?

ONORIEN

No. You?

Arris weakens slightly but recovers quickly, the emotion playing quickly over his face as he realizes he has asked a question he would also have to answer, a fact of his life he likes to avoid as much as possible.

ARRIS

I had a family. My wife and kids died a number of years back.

(a beat)

Made me realize the urgency of life.

ONORIEN

I’m sorry to hear of your loss. How did your life change?

Arris quickly reverts to his covert ops persona, inventing a cover story based on the DEA project he had been working on.

ARRIS

I bought a helicopter and started up a scenic island tours flight business. I fly honeymooners around islands and let them look out the doors at island waterfalls and jungle and all the sharks nobody wants to see swimming in the water offshore of the beaches.

(a beat)

At least I did until yesterday.

EXT. EVENING – CONTROL TENT AT JUNGLE LZ

Gregoire has been poring over maps that show the currents for the area where the helicopter went down. He is certain Arris, at least, is alive. Perhaps floating in his floatation vest, but he thinks he most likely made it to one of the many islands the currents would have carried him by. A DEA agent enters the tent.

AGENT

So far, nothing. It’s been more than 24 hours … it doesn’t look good.

GREGOIRE

No, but we’ve been looking in the wrong area.

(spreads map, taps)

We need to look in this area. The currents would have taken him this way and we’ve been looking over here. We’ve basically wasted a day.

AGENT

Yeah, well, since this is an unofficial mission, the search is off, at least as far as the agency is concerned. We contacted your company and they’re going to work with a Coast Guard cutter that’s in the area, but we’re under orders to pull our assets out before the cartel figures out it was us watching them.

(sympathetically)

Sorry.

GREGOIRE

They already know it was you.

AGENT

Maybe.

GREGOIRE

I’ll take the boat back to Miami when I’m done.

The Agent nods and leaves.

EXT. EVENING – MOTOR BOAT

The sun is setting as Gregoire pilots the boat to the east.

INT. EVENING – DRAWING ROOM

Arris and Nereika sit in a room with stuffed leather chairs, maroon velvet drapes, an enormous fireplace. There are more books on shelves, and Arris is coming to the quick conclusion that Onorien is a different kind of soul, stuck in a time period that no longer exists, where men leave the women after dinner to talk politics and drink brandy.

ARRIS

Your … boss … has an interesting design style.

NEREIKA

How do you mean?

ARRIS

Well, this is a little old fashioned, shall we say?

NEREIKA

(naively)

He just had this furniture put in last year.

ARRIS

I hope his Miami home is a bit more with the times.

ONORIEN (O.S)

Mr. Arris, can I interest you in a brandy and a cigar?

Nereika departs. Arris stands.

ARRIS

Do you have scotch?

ONORIEN

(opens a large liquor cabinet)

Of course. I’m civilized. Single malt?

ARRIS

(nods)

You know, a guy could come to like living this way.

ONORIEN

(smiles slightly)

A “guy” already has.

Onorien slides a glass with scotch in it to Arris, then pulls a cigar box from a drawer. He pulls out two cigars, two cigar cutters and two lighters and slides one of each over to Arris. They light the cigars. Onorien walks over to a glass door and pulls it open, motioning for Arris to follow.

EXT. EVENING SUNSET – VERANDA - CONTINUOUS

They exit the mansion.

ONORIEN CONT’D

So, Mr. Arris, what did you do before you started ferrying tourists around Carribean islands?

ARRIS

I ferried Rangers to battlefields.

(looks to Onorien)

I was a helicopter pilot in the Army.

ONORIEN

Ahh, so you traded on the skill.

ARRIS

Yeah.

Arris takes in the view from the veranda and is amazed. The building is perfectly placed to take in the sun as it sets into the water exactly mid-way through the island’s silhouette.

ARRIS

Wow.

ONORIEN

So, there are people looking for you, you said.

ARRIS

Yeah. There should be. But, I’m going to guess they’re going to conclude I crashed in the water and sank to the bottom. So, I don’t expect much. Although, they’ll be a bit surprised when I call from wherever your supply boat lets me off on the mainland.

ONORIEN

Do you know what caused your aircraft to crash?

ARRIS

Oh, yeah. I was on it at the time.

(a beat, sizes Onorien up)

Multiple systems failures and then the engine quit. Highly unusual, but not unheard of. Fortunately I was able to autorotate to the water, which, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find out I could do.

ONORIEN

Perhaps it was the effects of The Triangle.

ARRIS

What triangle?

Onorien gives Arris a look of incredulousness, as if he can’t believe Arris is ignorant of The Bermuda Triangle.

ONORIEN

The Bermuda Triangle.

ARRIS

(stifling disbelief)

The Bermuda Triangle?

ONORIEN

(motions through the air with his cigar)

This particular part of it is quite powerful.

ARRIS

Well, all I know about it is what I’ve seen on television. Ships disappearing and stuff like that.

ONORIEN

Yes, but where do they all go? How come nobody ever comes out?

ARRIS

Well, I’d wager they’re down on the bottom of the ocean with my helicopter.

ONORIEN

Or, perhaps, they made their way to some little island like this one, like the natives who live here now, generations of slaves and slave traders mingling their genes and creating a new hybrid of human.

Why didn’t they ever leave? None of them? Why was nothing of them every discovered? Perhaps the power of The Triangle keeps them here, hides them and the means that brought them here.

ARRIS

(politely dismissive)

Why would it let everybody else move through without bother but target them? It’s not like the Caribbean isn’t a high draw tourist destination.

I’ve been flying around here for a while and never had a problem.

(a beat)

Until yesterday, anyway.

ONORIEN

My point exactly: how does it work?

ARRIS

Okay, how?

ONORIEN

(shrugs)

That is why I come here. To study it. To find its nature; to understand its magic. There are strange forces in the world, strange places with mystical powers. I work to understand them.

ARRIS

What, you’re some sort of paranormal investigator?

ONORIEN

(considers)

In a manner of speaking. I investigate the things that nobody

believes in, but the things that seem to need believed in, if you will. You call it paranormal, I call it “the divine.”

ARRIS

The divine? What, like religious?

ONORIEN

Almost, but, no. Since the era of man began, man has always believed in, or, at least, professed a disbelief in, certain kinds of things. We no longer believe in magic or monsters or demons or devils, but, long ago, mankind did. Did you know, Mr. Arris, that at one time long ago nearly every civilization on the planet believed in the existence of dragons? Now, nobody does. How does such a belief change?

ARRIS

I don’t know. Maybe because nobody saw any dragons?

ONORIEN

And, yet, nobody sees the gods they worship, and yet almost everybody on the planet believes in a god. Indeed, many religions actively proselytize to gain adherents and can show no evidence of the god they worship. You don’t need to spend much time at all looking for evidence of the magical to find it, to find the stories that show equal numbers of people once believed in it.

ARRIS

Well, as I understand it, magic and all that was how the early humans interpreted the world, since they were unable to know the science of things. Religion was more a metaphysical reaction to the world, a “what does it all mean” interpretation. Since

nobody can know, religion filled the void. There’s been a lot of philosophical debate over it ever since.

ONORIEN

And you? Are you a man of faith?

ARRIS

In religion? No.

(turns toward the jungle, softly)

I lost my faith a while ago.

Onorien walks down the veranda to another door, he pulls it open.

ONORIEN

Come.

Onorien walks through the door.

INT. EVENING – DISPLAY ROOM

Arris walks into the room and is immediately awestruck by the collection of artifacts in the room. Swords, pikes, halberds, daggers, skulls, books, scrolls, staves and wands are everywhere, mixed with suits of armor, busts of men and some framed artworks on the walls.

ARRIS

Wow, you’ve got your own natural history museum.

ONORIEN

More than that. These are rarities of peculiar pedigree.

Arris wanders the room, examing the various items. He remembers he has a cigar.

ARRIS

(raises cigar)

This isn’t a problem in here?

ONORIEN

No.

Arris strolls among the displays and stops at a crystal globe.

ARRIS

Is this a crystal ball?

ONORIEN

It is.

ARRIS

Does it work?

ONORIEN

No.

(a slow beat)

Or, rather, it might if anyone else possessed one and knew how to use it. But the world is not full of people with faith in such objects, so it is unlikely that if someone has one, they believe they can make it work.

ARRIS

You see these all the time in psychics’ houses, at least from what I see in TV shows.

ONORIEN

(condescending)

Psychics are charlatans, confidence artists preying on the weak-minded for money. They believe in their con, not the divine nature of the world.

ARRIS

So you’re a man of faith, then?

ONORIEN

Oh, yes.

(a beat)

How can you believe mankind was created by god in his own image and not believe we also have been created to access some of that same power?

Mankind believed this for tens of thousands of years until modern religions crushed that belief. Now, mankind believes in nothing, only the hope of eternal salvation for a life spent believing that if you follow some religious prescriptions, you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife.

(a long, uncomfortable beat)

All of the items in the room, Mr. Arris, were regarded by the original owners to have magical powers. This is what they believed, what they had faith in.

Arris wanders a bit and stands before a 16-inch wand with intricate carvings and colorful designs. He turns to Onorien.

ARRIS

Okay, but what happened when the magic didn’t work and these saps were standing there with a magic whatever-this-is and the other guy had an actual sword in his hand?

ONORIEN

You assume that the wielder of the wand did not truly believe it would work. You should ask yourself: what if it would. You don’t really think someone would show up with one in a fight for his life and not believe it would work.

ARRIS

Yeah, but my point is, it’s just a stick with paint on it.

Arris turns and sees a black sword on a wall nearby. The blade and hilt and guard are all black, but there is intricate symbology along the side of the blade and a small green stone set in the base of the hilt. The sword is short, a 26-inch blade, and does not seem to reflect light or glint in any way. Arris approaches it and looks at the detail on the blade.

ARRIS

This is cool.

ONORIEN

It is the sword commissioned by a German baron in the early 1800s, Baron Ewald von Hoth.

FLASHBACK:

EXT.. NIGHT – A CASTLE IN GERMANY

It is a stormy night, with thunder and lightning. The castle glows with each flash.

INT. NIGHT – CASTLE ROOM

Baron Ewald von Hoth paces in a room, nervous, anxious, uncertain.

VON HOTH

God would not desert me in my hour of need.

UNSEEN (O.S.)

You cannot be so sure of God’s plan, Ewald.

EXT. NIGHT – CASTLE GROUNDS

The storms grows intense, the thunder crescendos and lightning flickers. Then, from the heavens, a slash of light slices through it all, a meteor burns its way through the atmosphere and crashes into the grounds of the castle, a loud explosion accompanying its arrival. It smolders in the rain.

ONORIEN (V.O)

Baron Ewald von Hoth feared a demon had been summoned to murder him and abduct his wife, a much younger peasant girl he had married because of her beauty and the rumor that she possessed some sort of magical powers. The demon wanted the girl because by killing her and eating her, it would consume her magical powers and grow stronger.

But there was nothing he could do, as weapons forged by man have no effect on demons. He prayed often for God to intervene, to show him the way, and then a meteorite landed on the grounds of his castle. He took this as a sign from god that the ore in the meteorite could be forged into a sword that could smite the demon, and he had it made into a weapon by a blacksmith with alchemical powers. He paid a princely sum for the sword when it was delivered.

While Onorien is talking, we see scenes of the moving of the meteorite, its delivery to the blacksmith, the blacksmith working on melting the ore and, later beating a sword into shape. The blacksmith inscribes the blade with runes and is seen chanting and venerating the blade. Then, an exchange of a cart of gold for the sword, the blacksmith riding away. Von Hoth surveys the sword, makes the sign of the cross and looks to the heavens in thanks.

ONORIEN (V.O.)

The baron intended to fight and destroy the demon and, as the legend goes, march into hell and kill Satan. But it was not to be. The baron was found dead the next morning, burned to an upside-down cross, the sword missing. His wife, missing.

We see images of a burnt body on a burnt inverted cross, servants weeping at dawn, an empty bedroom chamber in turmoil.

ONORIEN CONT’D (V.O.)

Nobody saw anything; nobody ever knew what happened.

END FLASHBACK

INT. EVENING – DISPLAY ROOM

ARRIS

Demons eat people?

ONORIEN

So the story goes.

ARRIS

I thought they just poked you with those three-pointed spears while you waded in burning whatever-its-called.

ONORIEN

Brimstone.

ARRIS

Right. Brimstone.

Nereika enters the room. Both men turn to her.

NEREIKA

Mm-

(a tiny beat)

Uhh, doctor, we’re ready, now.

ONORIEN

Excellent.

(off Arris)

Feel free to indulge with the liquor cabinet and cigars. I must go.

Arris watches Onorien leave with Nereika.

ARRIS

(off the room)

Okay, so it is an all-inclusive resort.

(a beat)

Run by a guy who collects pretend artifacts.

FADE OUT:

END ACT TWO

ACT THREE

FADE IN TO:

EXT. NIGHT – THE BOAT AT SEA

Gregoire is piloting the boat past an island. He is looking at the map, tracing his course across it with his finger. He stops to make a notation on the map with a grease pencil, checks the boat’s main compass. It is spinning madly. He taps it. Nothing. He picks up some of his gear, sorts through it, and pulls out a standard-issue lensatic compass and opens it. The needle spins constantly.

GREGOIRE

Now, that’s just not right.

Gregoire adjusts the map to reflect his position relative to the island he knows he’s near, looks around, checks both compasses. They both point in different directions. Gregoire taps his head as if just remembering something, sorts back through his gear and pulls out a GPS device. The display flips through various locations, none of them remotely matching where he is. He tosses the unit. Gregoire stands and scans the heavens, locates a constellation and traces it back to the North Star. He aligns the map a little more.

GREGOIRE

At least my eyes are working.

He pushes the throttle of the boat forward and continues into the night.

INT. NIGHT – ONORIEN’S MANSION

Arris gathers his knife from his survival vest and walks softly through the mansion and exits quietly.

EXT. NIGHT – THE ISLAND JUNGLE

Arris is walking along the edge of the beach, close to the jungle edge. He is off to investigate the issue of the natives, which he finds odd, given Onorien’s explanation. He is heading toward where he believes the natives live, and is moving cautiously, the knife from his survival vest in hand. He hears a noise and ducks down into the underbrush. Nothing. He continues on, careful of ambush, careful of silhouetting himself or giving his position away. He hears something again and freezes, slowly lowering to the ground.

He hears voices talking animatedly, but he cannot make out the language. He crawls forward slowly through the jungle growth until he reaches the edge of a small clearing. He pushes aside a few plant branches and sees a gathering of light-skinned black men, all about 20-something in age, all wearing vaguely costumish get-ups that are obviously hand-made using local materials. The costumes look vaguely like your stereotypical wizard, robe-like outfits. All the men are holding sticks or staves in idle positions.

NATIVE 1

Tonight is the night. He won’t be expecting it.

NATIVE 2

He will be expecting it after the events at the beach today. We shouldn’t have tried that plan.

NATIVE 1

No. He will understand that to have been a trap to capture the mainlander. He will think all is well.

NATIVE 3

But they have taken Renoir. Surely, they are up to something.

NATIVE 1

Yes, he is up to something, the more reason we should act. He will be occupied elsewhere and not on guard. We tell the villagers that we need them to free Renoir so that we can free Nereika.

(a sorrowful beat)

We all know what it is he does with her. They will come.

(a beat)

It is time for this to end.

NATIVE 2

But what of the mainlander? We know nothing about him other than he washed ashore on the beach. Onorien–

NATIVE 1

We kill him. If the white man gets in the way, we kill him. Yes, it may be another of Onorien’s tricks and we must be on guard.

NATIVE 3

Nereika will fight for him.

NATIVE 1

Yes, she will.

NATIVE 2

Do we kill her?

NATIVE 1

If we must. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,

(a beat)

But if we kill the wizard first, she’s free of him.

INT. NIGHT – THE MANSION

Arris is searching stealthily-yet-quickly through the mansion, trying to get the layout down, examining the routes in and out. In the kitchen, he picks up a much larger knife than the one from his survival vest. He enters the drawing room and quickly opens several cabinets which reveal only ordinary items.

ARRIS

Where’d everybody go?

He pours himself a sizable glass of scotch and walks out of the drawing room.

INT. NIGHT – THE LIBRARY

Arris enters and sets the knife down on a table. He takes a deep sip of the scotch, pulls a book down from a shelf and sits. He opens the book and idly flips through it, pausing at strange diagrams, unable to make sense of the language. He checks the spine and notes the title is unintelligible. He puts it back, takes down another.

ARRIS

(reading aloud, softly)

“It is the faith of the caster that determines the outcome of the spell, its power, its intensity. It is faith in the mystical that is required for the mystical to become real.”

(skips a few pages)

“To cast a spell, the caster must know it will be cast, know that there is no other possibility, know that there has never been anything but a certainty of the spell as real for the spell to be real.”

Arris closes the book and puts it back, takes a sip from his glass and takes in the sheer number of books on the shelves, suddenly realizing how many of them are titles about divinity, faith, transmutation and casting spells. Arris puts the book back in place and pulls another one. It comes only half-way out, a bookshelf to his right turning silently open, revealing a secret passage.

ARRIS

You have to be kidding me.

EXT. NIGHT – THE BOAT

Gregoire cuts the engines and turns on a flashlight to check his map. He looks over the gunwale at the island silhouette in the distance. There is only open water on the map. He marks an X on the map where the island should be. Gregoire turns the boat toward the island and heads for it.

EXT. NIGHT – THE BOAT AND ISLAND SHORE

As Gregoire nears the island, he turns on the floodlight on the front of the boat and sweeps the shoreline with the beam. As he nears, he sees an old rickety pier jutting into the water, a handful of primitive fishing vessels tied to it. He maneuvers the boat and parks it. He shoulders a submachinegun and grabs a flashlight from the boat and steps onto the pier, walking toward land.

EXT. NIGHT – THE ISLAND

Gregoire notes a dozen or more structures on the island, simple huts but in good repair. He sees nobody, hears nothing. He sweeps his flashlight beam through the village as he nears, notices a cooking pit with pots and pans on a nearby table. He tests the heat of the embers. Gregoire reacts to the heat: they are still warm. Gregoire walks to the entrance of the hut and sees it is not a door, but streams of handmade rope. He parts them and peers in. The hut is empty, but recently lived in. Gregoire goes to another hut and looks through the sash, sees sleeping children on a floor mat.

INT. NIGHT – SECRET CORRIDOR

Arris is inching slowly down a dimly lit corridor when he hears a scream that bends into a whimper. Then, some unintelligible talking followed by what sounds like desperate implorations for mercy. More unintelligible talking. Then:

ONORIEN

It’ll be much easier on you if you just answer the question, Renoir.

RENOIR

But I told you, I don’t know anything about it.

Arris steps forward and takes a position in the shadows near the top of a staircase carved from the wall, descending a half-turn into a cavern below. He sees a light-skinned black man chained to a wall. The man is covered in sweat and stripped to his handmade underwear. He is panicked and fearful. Then:

ONORIEN

Electricus!

Arris watches as a short burst of blue electrical sparks fill the air and strike the man, who writhes in pain as if shot by a Taser before collapsing into the manacles around his wrists. He breathes heavily. Arris considers his options and wonders what’s going on. He inches forward just slightly enough to peer around the corner blocking his view of the source of the electric shocks. He sees Onorien and Nereika, both are wearing robes with intricate designs on them. It makes no sense to him. The man on the wall struggles back to his feet and leans against the wall, looking around in desperation, unsure how his life has brought him to this moment. Then: he see Arris.

RENOIR

Please. Help me. Stop them from killing me.

The camera swings violently from Onorien’s POV to reveal Arris crouching in a shadow, partly hidden in darkness.

ONORIEN

Mr. Arris, this is most unfortunate, I had hoped to wait until another day to test your limits.

Onorien changes stance and faces Renoir.

ONORIEN

(points a fist at Renoir)

Exuro!

A fireball the size of a beach ball flies from Onorien’s fist and engulfs Renoir, rendering him a blackened husk, his scream a fraction-of-a-second in duration.

Arris gasps. Onorien turns. Arris runs.

ONORIEN (O.S.)

Nereika, after him!

INT. NIGHT – SECRET CORRIDOR

Arris races down the corridor toward the entrance. As he gets to the end Nereika crests the top of the stairs behind him.

INT. NIGHT – LIBRARY

Arris bursts from the hallway into the room and a microsecond later a small, baseball-sized fireball erupts against the wall in the corridor behind him. He pushes the bookshelf closed, runs across the room, sees the knife from the kitchen, takes it and turns just as Nereika pushes the door open. Arris lets loose with the knife and it spins toward Nereika and she closes the door quickly. The knife stabs a book. Arris runs out.

INT. NIGHT – CORRIDORS – CONTINUOUS

Arris slams the door behind him and races down a hall, then down another hall and into the foyer. He pulls the door open and immediately sees a large group of natives crossing the lawn with torches, armed with spears and machetes.

ARRIS

Nuts.

He closes the door and runs down a hall. Arris rushes into the Drawing Room and out onto the veranda, down it and into the Display Room.

INT. NIGHT – DISPLAY ROOM

Arris walks quickly around the room, bends down and quickly pulls his small pistol out. He hears footfalls nearing. Nereika enters the room and points at Arris.

NEREIKA

Electricus!

A thin tendril of blue electricity erupts from her finger and shocks Arris, stiffening him for a moment, temporarily paralyzing him. The moment is brief and Arris raises the gun and shoots Nereika in the stomach. She collapses to the ground and clutches her belly, blood seeping through her fingers.  Arris strides over to a window and looks through it to the ground, about ten feet down. He tries to open the window but it won’t budge. He moves quickly to another window and tries to open it, but it is also stuck. He walks to a stand holding a sword, takes it up and jams the blade into the base of the window, intent on using the sword as a crowbar

Off screen we hear a contemptuous, dismissive laugh. Arris spins and raises his pistol as Onorien makes a “come here” motion with his fingers.

ONORIEN

Exarmo!

The pistol is ripped from Arris’ hand and skitters across the floor toward Onorien, who glances at it as if it were a pathetic toy. Arris reaches for the sword stuck in the window, and Onorien lets the tiniest smile flicker across his lips.

ONORIEN

Cohibeo!

Onorien moves his palm to the side and Arris is pushed against the wall, where he struggles but cannot budge away. Onorien turns away and walks over to Nereika and bends down to her.

ONORIEN

Move your hands aside, child.

Nereika complies, and Onorien carefully pulls aside the fabric around her wound, observing it. Nereika moans in pain and disbelief.

ONORIEN

Shh, you’ll be okay.

Onorien places his hands a few inches above the wound.

ONORIEN

(softly)

Retardo!

EXT. NIGHT – NATIVE VILLAGE

Gregoire has been searching for signs of adults and found only sleeping children and a few elderly or infirm individuals, also sleeping. He walks away from the village toward the pier and looks around, curious and disbelieving.

GREGOIRE

A non-existent island populated with children and old people. No wonder it’s not on the map.

Gregoire walks away from the village and down the pier toward the boat.

EXT. NIGHT – THE BOAT

Gregoire is piloting the boat out to sea, around the island toward the next one marked on the map. He has crossed this island off on the map with a grease pencil as “checked.” Like all the others on the map.

INT. NIGHT – THE DISPLAY ROOM

Onorien rises from Nereika and strides slowly toward Arris, who is struggling against unseen forces.

ONORIEN

You can stop struggling, Mr. Arris, you will remain where you are until I release you.

ARRIS

You know, I’m gonna have to admit to being a little bit behind the power curve on what’s going on here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not good.

(a beat)

At least, not for me.

Onorien smiles.

ONORIEN

You are not a man with faith, are you, Mr. Arris?

ARRIS

Faith in what?

ONORIEN

In anything, I gather. Only the faithless are so easily restrained.

ARRIS

Well …

ONORIEN

Yes, exactly.

ARRIS

I don’t exactly see where you’re going with this.

ONORIEN

For starters, perhaps you should tell me who you really are and how you ended up on my island.

ARRIS

I already told you that.

ONORIEN

Yes, you told me a story, to be sure, but I am not one who would believe an aerial tour operator would routinely arm himself with a pistol.

ARRIS

It’s dangerous here in the Caribbean.

(a beat)

Dangerous in some pretty far-fetched ways, judging from the way things are unspooling.

Arris looks around the room at the artifacts collection. He tries to move against the mystical force and can’t, though he realizes his arms and legs can move along the wall, and he takes a half-step to the side.

ARRIS

Although, I’m starting to believe that maybe all this stuff you’ve got in here is maybe the real deal, and not some fantastical ravings of an island hermit.

Onorien opens his hand and moves it quickly forward and inch through the air:

ONORIEN

Pulsus!

Arris is shoved against the wall, his head banging it.

ONORIEN

Now, Mr. Arris. I ask you again, how did you come to be here? Who sent you?

ARRIS

Technically? Nobody sent me. I was on the way to pick up some honeymooners for an hour long flight over a couple of islands.

(off mystical force)

But I think there’s a better question begging for an answer, and that’s: “What the hell are you doing to me?”

Arris takes another half-step to the side, testing.

ONORIEN

It’s a rather mundane Restraint Spell, Mr. Arris, and there is nothing you can do to free yourself.

ARRIS

(subsiding disbelief)

Spell?

ONORIEN

Yes. You don’t believe in divine forces, do you, Mr. Arris? I infer also that you probably do not believe in anything that your eyes have not seen, and yet here you are, subject to a force you do not believe in.

But, like most people in the modern world, you probably do believe in all manner of things you have never seen but have experienced. Have you ever seen how your voice is encoded and decoded by a telephone? No. But you believe it works. Have you ever seen an atom split? No. But you believe it can be done.

And the world over, billions of people believe in various beings of omnipotent power and omniscient knowledge that somehow orchestrated

all that is on the planet. And, yet, those beings never make their presence known.

ARRIS

Yeah, but with some of that stuff, I know where to look it up. I mean, if I ever cared how a phone worked, I’m sure I could find a helpful Website. And the atom thing, well, I’ve seen the films.

ONORIEN

Exactly my point, Mr. Arris. You have faith you can prove your beliefs, even if you never bother to prove them to yourself. You have faith that a phone will work because they always work.

(a small beat)

But when your Internet connection fails, don’t you wonder why it’s not working? Don’t you say to yourself,

(discontentment voice)

“But it’s the Internet. It’s computers, how is not working?”

ARRIS

That’s why I switched from dial-up to broadband, it’s more reliable.

ONORIEN

No, Mr. Arris. It is your faith in technology that made you switch, your faith that the newer was better. Your blind faith that the scientists and engineers and technologists have figured out how the world works.

(a beat)

But they have only figured out one way the world works.

Onorien shows a palm and moves his hand a tiny fraction forward:

ONORIEN

Pulsus!

Arris bangs his head off the wall.

ARRIS

Hey! Do you have to do that?

ONORIEN

Have you figured out, yet, any other ways the world might also work?

There is a rising incidence of background activity, of doors opening, people running, glass shattering. Onorien turns for a moment and looks down the hall, sees nothing. He is unperturbed.

ONORIEN

The natives are restless.

(turns to Nereika)

Nereika, can you stand?

Nereika is sitting against a wall. She looks up at Onorien uncertainly. She struggles and stands. She is weak.

ONORIEN

Go hold them off until I arrive.

Nereika moves off down the hall, slowly, clutching her belly.

Onorien turns to Arris.

ONORIEN

Faith, Mr. Arris.

ARRIS

Faith?

ONORIEN

Yes. It is the other way the world works.

ARRIS

Faith in what?

ONORIEN

Anything.

ARRIS

(doubtful)

Anything?

ONORIEN

To an extent, certainly. And here you are an atheist to the world of the divine, yet an adherent to the world of science. Faith. And you are not religious, as I recall. So your faith, such as it is, is in the ability of a small group of a certain type of people to tell you that certain things can and cannot be done.

(a long beat)

Is that a religion?

Arris stares in disbelief and shrugs.

ARRIS

I call it science. It seems to work.

ONORIEN

Yes, well let us see if science can free you.

There is a loud crash and much yelling down the hall and Onorien turns just as a crowd of natives turns the corner and starts advancing down the hall, spears and machetes in hand. Onorien steps toward them and removes a palm-sized crystal cut into a pyramid shape.

ONORIEN

Procella Infucatus!

From the crystal a small Technicolor storm of light erupts, forms, and begins to streak outward. Onorien orients the crystal in his hand and the beam strikes down the hallway at a small knot of brave natives striding down it. They evaporate upon contact with the beam and those farther down the hall stop in their places.

Arris moves against the wall, away from Onorien. He looks around quickly, looking for any way to get away from the wall. His head bonks into the hilt of the black sword of the baron and he winces a second, but makes no sound, and looks to see what he has contacted. He reaches up for the sword and grasps the hilt and stumbles away from the wall.

Arris looks over at Onorien, whose back is to him, and watches as Onorien directs the beam down the hall toward the other natives, who are backpedaling cautiously. One throws a spear and it dissolves in the beam. Onorien laughs to himself.

Arris steps slowly, stealthily toward Onorien, not wanting to let it be known he is mysteriously free of the wall.

FADE OUT:

END OF ACT THREE

ACT FOUR

FADE IN TO:

INT. NIGHT - DISPLAY ROOM

Arris is creeping up on Onorien, who is casting a spell against an attacking band of island natives.

ONORIEN

(softly)

Impello!

The beam of light increases and dashes forward at the retreating natives, enveloping them, evaporating them. Onorien smiles. Behind him, we see Arris raising the black sword and slashing violently against Onorien, the blade crashing into Onorien’s right arm, slicing to the bone, the crystal leaping from Onorien’s hands and skittering down the hall. When the crystal comes to a rest, the beam, uncontrolled by Onorien’s will, begins to twist in a counter-clockwise pattern, tearing through brick and stone and everything else it touches, evaporating everything it touches. Onorien turns as Arris pulls the blade out.

ONORIEN

(while turning)

Idiot! Do you –

As he turns, Arris quickly thrusts the blade into Onorien’s gut, and the wizard pauses, looks down at the blade in him, back up at Arris, and then blood trickles from his lips. He slips from the blade to the floor, his hands on his stomach wound.

ONORIEN

(weakly)

You fool.

As the beam from the crystal revolves, it begins destroying the mansion, and the ceilings start falling. Arris looks down at Onorien.

ARRIS

Can you turn that off?

Onorien suffers on the floor, desperately trying to compose himself. The house shakes as the beam cuts through more of it. Arris steps away from Onorien and searches for an exit. Suddenly, the doorway to the veranda collapses, the room shakes as a wall nearest the crystal comes in contact with the beam from the crystal. Arris sees a window he could not open before and runs toward it, heaving the sword ahead of him. The sword crashes through the window and Arris leaps through the opening.

EXT. NIGHT – THE MANSION GROUNDS

The mansion is being destroyed in a supreme lightshow. From several doors, natives come running out at full pace. At the edge of the grounds, the native wizards watch in awe.

NATIVE 1

What’s going on in there?

NATIVE 2

(off mansion)

Nothing good.

NATIVE 1

Nothing good ever went on in there.

Nereika stumbles through the front door of the mansion and down the steps, tears streaking her face. She clutches her belly and makes her way across the lawn, the mansion disintegrating and burning behind her.

NATIVE 2

Look, Nereika.

Native 2 makes a move forward but is stopped by the arm of Native 1.

NATIVE 1

No. We cannot be sure.

Nereika collapses to her knees and starts weeping uncontrollably, deep sobbing gasps of grief and desperation and disbelief. The two natives look at each other curiously.

Just then the sword breaks through the window and spins through the air, stabbing the ground blade-first, silhouetted against the light show like a cross, a small green jewel in the base of the hilt aglow. Moments later, Arris jumps through the broken window and falls to the ground, breaking his fall with a roll.

Arris gets up and sees the last few natives disappearing into the tree line at full run, turns to look at the building in disbelief, and begins running across the lawn toward the jungle scrim when he sees Nereika bundled against herself on the grass, bawling. He grabs his survival knife from his rear waistband and approaches cautiously.

EXT. NIGHT – THE BOAT

Gregoire is cutting parallel to the shore of the island when the sky over the center of the island, deep in the jungle, erupts into light all the colors of the rainbow.

GREGOIRE

What the?

He cuts the boat’s engine and watches for several seconds as the light show intensifies, tendrils of colors turning lazily up into the night sky. Then, he sees smoke against the light, hears distant crashing noises, the barest hint of a scream.

He pushes the throttles forward and turns to the shore, rushing the boat onto the sand in the surf. He tosses the anchor out quickly and grabs his sub-machinegun and flashlight. He hops out of the bed and walks quickly toward the jungle line. He hears running noises from the jungle and pauses, but nothing comes of it. He moves on.

EXT. NIGHT – MANSION GROUNDS

Arris approaches Nereika warily, from behind. He keeps a little distance, and circles her, watching in astonishment as the light storm eveloping the castle grows. Nereika catches sight of him and looks up, suddenly scared through her tears.

NEREIKA

I’m sorry about … thank you.

ARRIS

Thank you? I shot you in the gut.

NEREIKA

No.

(regards her wound)

You freed me, somehow.

ARRIS

Freed you?

NEREIKA

I’ve been his slave for almost six years. The things he’s made me do.

(a beat)

The things he’s done to me.

(breaks into more intense sobbing)

I thought… I just … it was unimaginable, and yet I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Nothing.

The wind noticeably increases and Arris looks around and back at the mansion. We see the sword in silhouette.

ARRIS

You know, I don’t know anything about what’s going on here, but I’m going to guess this is one of those moments where running is required.

(extends hand)

Can you at least walk?

Nereika nods and takes his hand. She stands and looks over her shoulder at the place she has been imprisoned for the past six years, a slave of the wizard in all ways. A brief fit of anger washes over her face, through the tears.

ARRIS

How’s your belly feel?

NEREIKA

It hurts like hell. But Onorien has slowed it down, so I won’t bleed to death anytime soon.

ARRIS

How?

NEREIKA

A “slow spell.” He cast one on the wound to slow the damage it causes.

ARRIS

Will you last until the supply boat gets here?

NEREIKA

There is no supply boat. There never was. He just told you that to make you less anxious to leave.

ARRIS

Then how do you get on and off the island.

NEREIKA

He had a boat in the cave, but the way to get there is now destroyed. It

was down a tunnel beyond the chamber you found us in tonight.

The camera pushes past the two and closes in on the sword. A tendril of light arcs out from a disappearing portion of mansion wall and touches the sword.

As Arris and Nereika reach the edge of the lawn, the world goes suddenly dark and the wind stops. They turn and see only the smudge of the mountain into which the mansion was built. Some smoke drifts from the site where the foundation once was, trailing off into the sky.

EXT. NIGHT – MANSION GROUNDS

Gregoire comes to the edge of a large clearing in the jungle, a patch of well-tended grass several acres in size. He pauses and crouches in the underbrush. The source of the lights he has seen while walking through the jungle is not evident, although he is certain it originated here. Instead, he sees a smoldering crater filled with masonry blocks, large wooden girders and debris. He readies his weapon and inches along the edge of the jungle, trying to figure out what he is looking at.

Then two shadowy figures emerge, silhouettes against the night sky from his perspective. One is a female dressed in a gown, inappropriate attire for the jungle; the other is a man with a sword. He creeps closer still, searching the shadows for evidence of additional people. He ducks behind some rocks at the edge of the mountain base and realizes there was a sizable building here not too long ago, now reduced to rubble. Not enough rubble.

He steps from the rocks and points the weapon.

GREGOIRE

Stay right where you are and make no movements.

ARRIS

(astounded)

Greg?

GREGOIRE

(astounded)

Arris?

Gregoire turns on his flashlight and waves the beam over the faces of the two people.

ARRIS

How did you get here?

Gregoire steps forward and bear-hugs Arris, who seems a bit embarrassed by the move.

GREGOIRE

In a boat, of course.

(a beat)

What happened to the agents?

ARRIS

They didn’t make it.

GREGOIRE

(pauses, then: off rubble)

What the hell is going on here?

ARRIS

I don’t know.

GREGOIRE

You don’t know?

ARRIS

I don’t know. Ask her, maybe she knows.

(off Gregoire)

Nereika, this is Greg.

(off Nereika)

Greg, Nereika.

GREGOIRE

(steps forward, extends hand)

Gregoire --

(suddenly shocked)

You’re shot.

Gregoire shoulders his weapon and pulls a medical kit and bandages out of a cargo slot on his combat harness.

GREGOIRE

Come, lay down.

Nereika looks to Arris, who nods that it’s okay. She lays down on the grass and Gregoire cuts away at the clothing near the wound. He sees the blood barely oozing out, rather than running from the hole as he knows it would, having seen bullet wounds many times before.

GREGOIRE

(to Nereika)

Who shot you, dear?

NEREIKA

He did.

Gregoire looks over at Arris, who only shrugs.

ARRIS

I’ll tell you later. I’m going to need a couple of drinks to make sense of this … episode.

Gregoire applies a bandage to the wound, packs his medical kit into the pouch on his harness and shines the light across the rubble.

GREGOIRE

What was it?

ARRIS

A big mansion.

(a beat)

We better get to your boat. She’s shot. She needs to get to a hospital. How far are we from anywhere?

EXT. NIGHT – THE BOAT ON OPEN SEA

The boat is pushing through the water at full speed, the wake white and foamy in the moonlight. In the distance, receding, is the island. Arris is looking at the map, tracing his path through the sea from crash site to island. Where the island should be is only a hand-drawn X, with a checkmark alongside it. He looks up and over the rear of the ship, at the island, then over to Nereika, who is sleeping on a bench.

INT. MORNING – HOSPITAL HALLWAY

Arris and Gregoire stand outside a hospital room. Inside, Nereika is sleeping after surgery. A police officer is walking down the hallway away from them, closing a notebook.

ARRIS

Well, everyone seems to be accepting the story.

GREGOIRE

Indeed, but what are we going to do about her.

ARRIS

That’s a good one. She has no passport, no ID, no bank account, no anything, as far as I know.

GREGOIRE

You think she’s a native of the island?

ARRIS

Most likely.

GREGOIRE

It’ll be tough for her to adapt, then.

The two look into the room and Arris nods that they should begin walking down the hall.

ARRIS

It’s going to be a number of days before she can be moved out.

(a beat)

We need to check back in with the company for debriefing.

GREGOIRE

What are you going to tell them?

ARRIS

(small laugh)

Not what really happened, that’s for damn sure.

GREGOIRE

What really did happen?

EXT. NIGHT – BACKYARD DECK OF ARRIS’ HOUSE

Arris and Gregoire are sitting at a table, a three-quarter-empty bottle of single malt scotch between them, their glasses filled generously. An ash tray with cigarette butts and a spent cigars sits to the side near a cigarette pack and a Zippo with the US Army Special Forces emblem on it. Gregoire sits agog, pondering the lit end of cigar.

GREGOIRE

That couldn’t have really happened.

Arris reaches into a cargo pocket on the department store brand cargo pants he’s wearing and pulls out the pyramid crystal and places it on the table, pushes it a few inches toward Gregoire.

GREGOIRE

This is the crystal? The actual crystal.

ARRIS

(nods)

Yep.

(a beat)

And don’t forget the sword.

GREGOIRE

(off crystal)

What are you going to do with it?

ARRIS

I’m not sure, but I figured it’d be a good idea to find out what it’s made of. It might be worth something.

They sit in silence for a moment, each taking a drink from their cups.

GREGOIRE

What do you think this all means?

ARRIS

I don’t know, I really don’t. It’s something so odd and inexplicable that … hell, Greg, what do you make of it? What do you think it means?

GREGOIRE

Well, it means the world--

ARRIS

(overlaps)

The world?

GREGOIRE

--isn’t what we think it is.

(a beat)

Or that the Bermuda Triangle is real, at least … maybe.

(considers)

What does the girl say?

ARRIS

Eh, only that she’d been under some spell of some sort by Onorien for six years, taught to be his apprentice at the cost of constant sex with him – rape, though she hasn’t used the word – and that she occasionally accompanied him on trips to Miami, where he mostly confined her to his home while he did whatever he did when gone.

She was a slave in every sense of the word, only he taught her … spells in return.

None of it makes any sense, and she hasn’t been able to offer any perspective on it. She doesn’t know why any of it happened.

GREGOIRE

(off house)

What are you going to do about her?

ARRIS

(off garden house in backyard)

I’m going to fix-up the garden house. It’s got heat and electric, so it’s somewhere private for her to live in.

(a beat)

We’ll figure the rest out later.

FADE OUT:

END OF ACT FOUR

TAG

FADE IN TO:

FLASHBACKS:

INT. NIGHT – THE DISPLAY ROOM

Onorien lies on the floor as Arris looks down at him.

ARRIS

Can you turn that off?

Arris looks back at the churning swirl of lights, looks to Onorien again, who lies on the floor, a hint of blood on his lips, his eyes searching the room. Arris turns and heaves the sword through a nearby window, waits a beat, then rushes and jumps through it.

The light storm rages and Onorien concentrates his strength for a final casting of a final spell.

ONORIEN

(quietly, but with full force of conviction)

Transporto!

As the light and wind increases, Onorien vanishes and the interior of the building collapses on the room.

END FLASHBACKS:

FADE OUT

END TAG