Anansi Island Read online

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  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7

  ANANSI ISLAND

  by Christian Cantrell

  This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

  PART ONE

  Someone had dragged splintered ammunition crates and blue plastic barrels of thickened flamethrower petrol out onto the beach just above the range of high tide. The men sat on them in the mornings to smoke and talk and drink strong coffee while watching the calico sunrises above the distant wooded island on the horizon.

  But it was afternoon and Laurel sat alone against a rough pine plank stamped "7.62MM" in a big bold font. She watched a column of smoke and ash rise from the north side of the island and merge with the low grey clouds above the steely blue Atlantic. The eight days she spent alone on that island had sharpened her senses and she could feel footsteps grinding in the sand behind her. She knew without looking that it was Jeremy Barrett since none of the other men were capable of breaching military formality enough to even initiate a conversation, much less settle down on the sand and share a crate with her on the beach.

  In the short time Laurel had been on the makeshift base, she and Barrett had already established the kind of relationship that allowed them to sit together in silence — something Laurel had never experienced before, and something she suspected was rare among any two people given all the personalities and idiosyncrasies and neuroses in the world. There was no need for pleasantries or small talk or even flirting.

  They both looked out over the ocean at the green wooded island, but it was the incongruous column of smoke that held their attention. Instead of the soft bluish billow of wood smoke, it had the dark gritty caustic quality of something that wasn't meant to burn.

  Barrett looked over at Laurel, then back out at the island.

  "How's the arm?"

  Laurel ran her fingers over the soft gauze dressing that covered her arm from wrist to elbow. "Itchy. I can't wait to get the stitches out."

  "You'll have quite a story to go along with that scar."

  "I'm pretty sure I'll have to make something up that's more believable. Something like a shark attack or a skydiving accident."

  Barrett smiled. "Listen, I apologize for the phone situation. We can't allow any civilian wireless communication yet, but we'll have the secure hard lines in place tomorrow."

  "It's ok. No one to call, anyway."

  "You know you don't have to stay here, right? I can take you anywhere you want to go."

  Laurel shook her head. "I don't think I'm ready to leave yet. Honestly, I don't even know where I'd go."

  "Well, you're welcome to stay as long as you want," Barrett told her, "at least while I'm in charge."

  Laurel wanted to lean toward the man beside her — to rest her temple against the course patch stitched to the shoulder of his fatigues — but she closed her eyes and kept herself still and just breathed in the salty smoky air coming off the water. "Thank you."

  Her dark hair blew across her face, but she let it go. They sat in silence for several minutes before Barrett spoke again.

  "How long has the island been a nature preserve?"

  "Almost thirteen years," Laurel said. "It was purchased by a company called BGR as what we call a 'PR diversion'."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means their main business is something the general public wouldn't approve of so they occasionally set up a wildlife refuge, or build an orphanage, or dig a well somewhere to distract people from what they really do."

  "Which is what?"

  "Who knows? As long as they left us alone, we never cared."

  "What was it before it was a wildlife refuge?"

  "Privately owned. A race car tycoon bought it and stocked it with all kinds of game for him and his friends to shoot. Before that, it was owned by the federal government, and before that, it was one of the main hubs of the Atlantic slave trade."

  "That island was used for slave trading?"

  "That's how it got its name," Laurel said. "Anansi is the name of the classic trickster in West African folklore. The slaves called it Anansi Island after realizing they'd been tricked by their own people and sold into slavery. Of course the name is even more appropriate now."

  "Why? What does it mean?"

  Laurel turned her head and looked at Barrett. She gathered her hair and pinned it back behind her ear. "Nobody told you what it means?"

  "No, why?"

  She laughed uneasily. "Anansi usually appeared as a man in stories, but he was actually a spider. The literal name of that place is Spider Island."

  PART TWO

  The last civilians to take the Croatan Ferry to Anansi Island were three classes of forth grade students from Pollocksville Elementary. Every year in early May, the Anansi Island State Park sponsored "Spider Night" in an attempt to instill some small appreciation of the miracles of nature in generations raised by video games, cell phones, and the internet. The students rotated between three stations: dinner (hot dogs, tubes of tofu, and warm wilted fruit salad served in the picnic area), Spider School (a melodramatic and sensational presentation on lycosidae, or wolf spiders), and the Spider Hunt (a competition to see which team could spot the most wolf spiders by the reflection of flashlight beams off their bulbous black eyes).

  Laurel taught Spider School. The entire project had been her idea four years ago, and the only way she could get approval was by agreeing to do the work nobody else wanted to do which essentially amounted to anything that required interacting directly with the kids. Laurel discovered in her first few weeks on the island that her colleagues' interest in the life sciences did not extend to the offspring of their own species.

  She sat on the hearth of the old disused stone fireplace in the nature center with the last of the three classes planted cross-legged in a semi-circle in front of her, fidgeting and jostling and overstimulated by their unfamiliar surroundings. A sealed mason jar with a brown and black inch-long arachnid propped against the side was being gingerly passed among pairs of small apprehensive hands.

  "Oh-kay," Laurel said with the exaggerated enthusiasm reserved for the young, "let's see how much you guys already know. How many legs do wolf spiders have?"

  The class responded with enthusiasm, but with an undertone of impatience at being asked such an inane question. After all, she wasn't dealing with first graders here. "Eight!"

  "Good. That was an easy one. How about eyes?"

  "Eight!"

  "That's right. Wolf spiders have eight eyes arranged in three rows." She held up a laminated photograph of a round, hairy head. The top and bottom rows of eyes looked like little black licorice clippings, but the two eyes in the middle were like wide shimmering drops of oil. The spider's powerful and overdeveloped mouthparts protruded absurdly like walrus tusks. "Wolf spiders have very good vision for hunting, and see much better than we do in the dark. In fact, that's how we're going to find them. They have these little layers of tissue at the back of their eyes called the tapetum lucidum which reflect light back through their retinas and lets their eyes gather more light than our eyes can. But it also creates something called eyeshine which means they're easy to find in the dark." Laurel paused to gauge the level of interest in her audience and decided to take a new direction. "Ok, who can tell me how wolf spiders hunt? Do they catch their prey in webs?"

  There was disagreement among the children. Most assumed that they did. Laurel picked out one of the dissenters and addressed her directly.

  "That's right, they don't use webs to catch their prey. Wolf spiders got their name bec
ause they hunt more like wolves. They chase their prey —" (she demonstrated with curled fingers) "— crush it with their huge powerful jaws, and inject it with venom and digestive enzymes."

  Many of the kids reacted with disgust at the vision Laurel had evoked, but she had their attention. She tried to maintain the momentum.

  "Now, how many spiders do you think there are on this island?"

  The children's estimates ranged from a hundred to a million.

  "We think there are probably around four million spiders on Anansi Island."

  Some of the kids were in disbelief while others either weren't especially impressed, or weren't capable of processing such a figure.

  "So do you think spiders are good or bad?"

  Most agreed that they were good.

  "That's right. Spiders are very helpful to the ecosystems they live in. Without spiders, we would be completely overrun by insects. In fact, the weight of all the insects consumed by all the spiders in the world every year is greater than the combined weight of the entire human population. That's a pretty big appetite, isn't it? Do any of you eat that much?"

  Some of the boys claimed that they did, and a few even looked the part. Most of the children absently pondered the connection between the amount that spiders eat and human beings.

  "So are you guys ready to go find some spiders?"

  They were. But as they jumped to their feet, Laurel stopped them.

  "Hold on, everyone. Let's make sure everyone knows the rules first. Before we go outside, we're going to break up into groups of four. Every group will be led by a parent or teacher who will be in charge of the flashlights and the counters. Each of you will get —"

  Laurel stopped at the sight of a park ranger standing in the back of the room trying to get her attention by frantically waving his hand in front of his throat.

  "Class, I need you to sit back down for a minute while I go talk to the ranger."

  The kids begrudgingly collapsed back down on the hard carpet while Laurel picked a path through them to the back of the room. She thought she knew all the rangers on the island, and even everyone from Croatan and Hofmann Parks, but she didn't recognize the man in the wide brimmed hat and short-sleeved button-down.

  "What's going on?"

  "We're canceling the rest of the evening," the ranger told Laurel. "Someone's lost."

  "Lost? One of the kids? What happened?"

  "We don't know. All we know is that there's a little girl missing."

  "How can someone be missing? Wasn't she with someone?"

  "We don't know the details yet, but we're not taking any chances. We need to get these kids loaded onto the buses and get them back down to the dock. We've already radioed the ferry, and it's on its way."

  "Do you think something happened to her? She's probably just mixed in with another group."

  "Like I said," the man told her, "we're not taking any chances."

  Laurel helped herd the kids into lines which fed into the two old school buses they kept on the island for shuttling visitors around the park. The children picked up on the adults' anxiety, and most withdrew into somber and stupefied moods. It took two trips to get everyone down to the dock at which point Laurel and the rest of park staff distributed themselves among search parties.

  The parents of the little girl were kept at the ferry launch on the mainland. They were told to bring unwashed clothing of their daughter's for the canine unit. Police boats brought the dogs and additional officers from New Bern and Swansboro, and one of the parents — a First Lieutenant from Camp Lejeune — promised additional vehicles and men if needed. A chopper was fueled and ready to go at first light, but as the sun came up, it was told to stand down.

  Laurel was with the party that found the body in the early morning mist. It wasn't far from the nature center, and in the light, it was hard to imagine how so many people had missed it. The child was lying facedown just off the path, and the little body was white and cold and stiff. Her shirt had rust colored stains on the back, and a trooper squatted down and slowly pulled it up. The wounds beneath were clean and decisive: two black holes in the pale skin just above the kidney. The body was partially covered in leaf litter, and there were bare patches of ground around her feet and dirty fingers where she had briefly dug for traction.

  PART THREE

  The sun set unceremoniously behind them, the colors muted by the low cloud cover and haze from the fires on the island. Barrett looked down and illuminated the face of his watch.

  "It's getting late. We should get inside."

  He climbed to his feet and offered Laurel his hand. She smiled as he pulled her up and toward him. They brushed themselves off in the breeze and started back to the camp.

  "You don't have dinner plans, do you?" he said.

  "I don't know. I'll have to check my calendar."

  "Well if you're free, I have a surprise for you."

  They passed the mess tent and Barrett led her to one of the administrative trailers. He opened the door for her and stepped back. Laurel smelled garlic in the cool air conditioned breeze coming from inside.

  "I hope you like Italian."

  "This doesn't smell like heated rations or MREs."

  "I figured since you're not quite ready to go back out into the world yet, I'd bring some of the outside world to you."

  Most of Barrett's desk had been cleared to make room for several covered aluminum dishes, two paper plates, plastic cups, and a bottle of red wine. A bluish LED lantern glowed on its lowest setting in the middle of the desk.

  "I couldn't find any candles, so I had to improvise."

  "This is incredible," Laurel said. She looked at him with eyes that shone in the dim blue light. The TV on the other side of the room was on, but muted. Laurel glanced back at it.

  "I'm sorry, I have to keep an eye on the news." He pulled out a plastic office chair for her, and she sat down. "Don't take it personally."

  "At least it's not a football game." She watched Barrett sit down across from her and reach for the wine. "What's the media saying, anyway?"

  "Nothing new. The coroner is still insisting that the little girl died from an undetected heart abnormality, and any injuries were sustained after her death, probably as a result of scavengers."

  "Unbelievable," Laurel said. She was shaking her head. "Who's going to tell the real story of what happened out there?"

  "We are," Barrett said. He was using a multi-purpose tool to uncork the wine. "That's what we're here for. As soon as we figure what the hell happened, we're going to make sure the world knows."

  "What if nobody believes us?"

  "We'll have proof." He filled a plastic cup halfway with wine and offered it across the desk. "That's why we're keeping quiet for now. No one's going to believe us at this point, but by the time we're ready to take this public, we'll have all the evidence we need."

  Laurel nodded. "I want to help," she said.

  Barrett filled his own cup. "Good. But I don't want to rush you. We can take this at whatever pace you're comfortable with. You don't have to tell me anything until you're ready."

  "It's ok," Laurel said. She tasted her wine. "I'm ready now."

  Barrett took a long sip from his cup, then reached for a covered dish. "In that case, let's start with the first time you saw one of those things."

  PART FOUR

  According to the dispatches, the evacuation was purely precautionary. It was determined to everyone's satisfaction that the little girl's death was caused by an undiagnosed congenital heart condition called aortic stenosis, but there were still some questions as to what had happened to her body postmortem. So far, animal control officers and wildlife biologists were in agreement that the marks on her back were simply exploratory bites from a nocturnal scavenger who turned out not to have a taste for human flesh. But in the interests of caution, both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the National Park Services recommended that Anansi Island be closed until further notice.

  Laurel had her
radio turned off that morning, and by the time she heard the news, she only had forty-five minutes to get down to the dock. Nobody knew how long the island would be inaccessible, so Laurel told her supervisor that she would not leave until all the animals in her care had been fed. She was told to do whatever she had to do, but under no circumstances was she to miss that last ferry.

  She usually fed the black rat snakes, king snakes, and corn snakes in the nature center individually, watching to make sure each one ate before moving on to the next. Trapping an aggressive and frightened rodent in a cage with a snake that is fasting before a shed or because she's carrying eggs can result in the rat inflicting severe and sometimes even fatal bites on the snake. Laurel would have liked to use pre-killed prey, but most of the snakes in the center were wild-caught and would not eat anything they didn't hunt and kill themselves, so she dropped one small live mouse into each cage and hoped for the best.

  The fish were already overfed by visitors, so she skipped the terraced rows of aquariums. The rest of the reptiles and amphibians were given several dozen adult crickets or mealworms coated in vitamin supplement powder along with fresh water. She misted the cages of the animals requiring higher levels of humidity, then covered the mesh tops with sheets of plastic wrap to keep as much of the moisture in as possible. After double-checking heat lamp timers, she made a circuit around the entire center, poking her finger into each potted plant and moistening soil with an aluminum watering can wherever it came up dry.

  All that was left was Stephanie.

  Stephanie was a red-tailed hawk that had been found on the mainland with a broken wing caused by a collision with a power line. The rehabilitation aviaries at Croatan National Forest were full, so Anansi was asked to take her. Laurel's aviaries were half a mile away from the nature center — far back from the trails in order to keep the birds from becoming too accustomed to people — so the only way to reach them was to walk straight back through the woods.

  Laurel packed several mice in her leather game pouch and left through the back exit. She checked her watch and saw that she had thirty minutes before the ferry pulled away. After feeding Stephanie and giving her fresh water, she still needed to get back to her loft and pack a bag for herself. If she took her bike on the trails rather than using the electric cart on the roads, she could still reach the dock in plenty of time. She would radio the ferry building before she left to let them know she was on her way.