Chapter Seventeen
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 uncoiling 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 connec
tion 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.”