Chapter Thirty-Two
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.