LITMIR.BIZ

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only fear now was that they would say no.

      The Happy-Me sat off the coast of Bimini in shallow water. Jenny and Mark Houghton and their friends Gabby and Dale Johnson had planned on camping on the beach, but they had gotten lazy. They hadn’t tied up at the dock because they’d kept the boat in the shallow water, and talked so late that the sun had gone down.

      Both retired, the couples motored the short distance to Haunt Island several times a year.

      Gabby and Dale had gone to bed, Mark was still topside and Jenny was humming as she put away the last of the dishes. They’d dined on spaghetti and meatballs, heated up in the microwave.

      She was startled to hear her husband call her name. “Jenny!”

      She nearly dropped the dish in her hand, it had been so quiet. She set it on the counter and hurried up the ladder to the deck. For a moment, it struck her that they might as well be alone in the world. Entirely alone. There were a few stars in a black-velvet sky, and it seemed that there was no horizon, the sea melded with the sky. The lights of the Happy-Me were colorful and brave against the night—and pitiful, as well.

      “Hand me the grapple pole there, quickly, Jenny,” Mark said, leaning over the hull and staring into the water.

      “What?”

      She was concerned. Mark had been given a clean bill of health after having suffered a heart attack on his seventieth birthday, but he thought himself a young man still, at times. And he was acting like a crazy one now.

      “That one,” he said, spinning around. There was a grappling hook on a long pole set in its place in metal brackets against the wall of the cabin.

      “But, Mark—”

      “Please, Jenny, please—there’s someone in the water!”

      She heard it then: a gasped and garbled plea for help.

      While Mark continued to stare into the water, Jenny reached for the hook, almost ripping it from the wall to bring to Mark.

      He stuck it out into the water, calling out, “Here, here, take this, we’ll get you aboard!

      “Ah!” he murmured. Jenny saw that someone had the pole and that Mark was managing to pull the person closer to the boat.

      “The flashlight, get a flashlight!” Mark said.

      Jenny turned to do so. As she did, she heard another gasping sound, and within it a little cry of terror.

      She spun around.

      The sound was coming from Mark.

      Because someone…something…was rising from the sea.

       It couldn’t be. It was a bony pirate, half-eaten, so it appeared, in rags. Bones and rags, and it was laughing.…

      “No!” Jenny gasped herself.

      The thing reached out and grabbed Mark around the neck. It lifted him and tossed him overboard. Jenny started to scream in protest, horrified for Mark, her companion, friend, lover, husband for all of her life.

      And then…

      In terror herself. For her own life.

      Because now the thing pulled a sword. A fat sword. Maybe it wasn’t a sword. Maybe it was a machete. Maybe it was…

      Her last conscious thought was, What the hell does it matter what it is?

      It swung in the night.

      She never managed to scream. Her windpipe was severed before she could do so. She dropped to the deck, her head dangling from the remnants of her neck.

      “Quickly,” said the one to the other, joining him on board. “Quickly. The other two, before they wake up!”

      The deck was drenched as they walked across it and down the ladder to the cabin below.

      Gabby and Dale never woke up.

      For a while, the Happy-Me rolled in the gentle waves of the night, beneath the velvet darkness of the sky.

      Then it sank to a shallow grave.

      Chapter Three

      Vanessa had the dreams again that night.

      They had started the night on the island when Georgia had talked about the monsters, left the island with Carlos—and wound up murdered with her head on the sand.

      For the first weeks after the incident, they’d come frequently. They would start with her being Isabella, rising from the sea in her period gown, covered with seaweed.

      Vanessa had agreed to play the small role of Isabella, and the day when they had filmed her in the costume had turned out to be fun—after she’d calmed down from being aggravated. There she had been in that gown, floating—a corpse that had come to the surface, about to open its long-dead eyes—and they were supposed to have been filming from beneath her. But in the middle of the shoot, they’d gotten distracted by a school of barracuda, and she’d looked up at last to see that the boat was far away and there was no sign of the others. She was a good swimmer, but the seas were beginning to rise and the gown was heavy. She lay there cursing them, then called out, hoping someone on the boat would hear her.

      The boat had come around at last with Jay and the others on board. They’d been thrilled with their footage of the barracuda—which usually left people alone, unless they had something on them that sparkled and attracted the attention of the predators. Incredulous, she’d asked if they’d gotten the shots of her, floating in the water. Oh, yes, they’d done so. Then, seeing her face, Jay had been entirely contrite, and everyone had tripped over themselves trying to appease her for the afternoon.

      But in her dreams, she didn’t see Isabella as herself. She saw her dead, murdered, empty sockets where her eyes should be, yet seeming to see, face skeletal and pocked with the ravages of the sea, bits of bone and skull peeking through decomposing flesh. The woman stared at her as if she were the enemy, and all around her, huge black shadows seemed to form, and they were made of seaweed and evil.

      Then she was alone on the beach at Haunt Island, and they were coming after her, and she didn’t run because there was nowhere to go to escape the darkness and evil, she simply stood there, staring at them, as they seemed to grow larger and larger and come closer and closer, and she could smell the rot of flesh and a stagnant sea and she could almost feel the salt spray of the ocean.

      Right before they embraced her, she awoke with a start.

      For a moment she was disoriented in the darkness of her room. Then she heard a whistle from below her window, the wheels of a late-night taxi going somewhere and the laughter of the few drunken revelers still on the street, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She was in her little studio room atop the bathing suit and T-shirt shop on Duval Street. A glance at the faceplate of her phone told her that it was just about 2:00 a.m.

      She stared at the ceiling for a while, angry with herself. She wasn’t afraid of ghosts or sea monsters. Someone real and alive had happened upon the island. A real person had killed her friends—and she just couldn’t believe it was Carlos. Carlos was probably dead. She hated the fact that everyone assumed that he’d been the killer, when he probably died trying to protect Georgia from whatever sick maniac had come upon them. It was chilling to think that the killer had to have been on the island with them when Georgia had first screamed, when they had all thought that Travis was fine somewhere, laughing at the cruel joke he had played on Georgia. They should have looked harder for Travis that night.

       And yet, who would have really suspected anything? They were a large enough group. They’d been enjoying the shoot, and even the pristine isolation of Haunt Island.

      She probably lay there for hours, and then drifted off.

      Vanessa’s phone rang at 8:00 a.m. She knew, because the jarring sound caused her to bolt up, and she

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