Violet Eyes (2 page)

They got to work setting up the first tent while the girls brought some of the smaller gear from the boat and piled it nearby.

Mark popped in the main pole at the same moment as Jess screamed.

“What?” he jumped out from the midst of the green fabric to see her standing on one foot just a couple meters away. Her hand massaged the top of one foot while her eyes stared at the beach in horror.

Casey held her shoulder. “Did it bite?”

“Did what bite?” Billy demanded, and Jess pointed at a spot on the sand. Billy knelt in front of her and stared at the thing she pointed at.

“What is it?” Mark asked, joining him.

“A spider of some kind,” Billy answered, leaning closer to stare at its thin but spiny legs, and oval, black back. A slash of violet colored its back half, like a bolt of lightning.

“Looks like a small crab,” Mark said. “Never seen a purple spider.”

Billy shook his head. “You’d think so, but that’s not a shell. Those legs are insect legs, not crab.”

“Is it poisonous?” Jess cried.

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “Did it bite you?”

Jess shook her head. “I was just standing there and I felt something tickle my foot. I looked down and there it was, standing on me. I kicked it off right away.”

Billy stood, and the spider began to run across the sand. But Billy didn’t let it go. He stepped to the left and ground the heel of his sandal on the thing, leaving a glimmering mess of black film and yellowish mush in his wake.

“It won’t bother you again,” he promised.

Jess hugged herself. “I hate spiders,” she said. “And where there’s one, there are always more.”

Jess had had no idea how true that statement was when she’d made it yesterday. Today they had discovered that there
were
more.

A lot more. And not just spiders…the island was overrun with tiny biting flies. After hiking from one side of the island to the other, the two couples had settled down in the sand and surf this afternoon to act out their private version of
Blue Lagoon
. Instead, they were interrupted by a swarm of flies that had driven them inland. The swarm had covered them like a cloud.

Since they had run from the beach and closed the door of the hut, the shadows had changed from orange to red to gray. Night was settling upon the island, and without a generator or flashlight, the hut was probably only minutes from pitch-black. Thankfully, it seemed to be free of bugs.

Billy fell asleep almost instantly, despite the cramped bed and stale air of the Quonset hut. Casey dozed for a while, but after a couple hours, she found herself lying awake, staring at the darkness of the round ceiling. Billy’s hand lay warm and limp against her breast. She grinned as she gently slid out from beneath his fingers. He could never seem to keep his hands off her tits, and, well, she loved that actually! It was too cute how he angled and negotiated a way to cop a feel even when they were out in broad daylight in a crowd of people.

But right now, the night hung thick in the tiny room and for a second, aside from the familiar touch of her boyfriend, she was disoriented. Then the events of the day came back to her. The warm joy of Billy’s need for her washed away. She rolled away from him, and realized the reason she’d awoken. A painful pressure ached below her belly.

She needed to pee.

And the one thing this tin-can hut didn’t have was a toilet.

Casey pressed her head back into the pillow and tried to ignore the feeling. Maybe she could just fall back asleep until morning.

Uh-uh.

Minutes later she could almost feel her leg growing wet. She
had
to go.

Damn it.

When she could ignore it no longer, she slowly disentangled herself from Billy’s arm and slipped out of the bed. She was going to have to step outside the hut and pee outside. It would only take a minute…you didn’t have to be a Boy Scout to pee in the woods, after all.

And bugs…bugs slept at night, right?

Casey let herself out of the hut. Her eyes were already accustomed to the dark, and thanks to the shadows of the moon through the palms, she could see well enough to step around to the side of the metal walls to relieve herself. She didn’t need to leave a puddle where they all would step on their way out the front door.

She tiptoed across the cool sand to the side of the metal shack and squatted to do her business in the shade of a heavy-leafed green bush.

But Casey was not alone in the night. Not by a long shot. She couldn’t see the legs that approached as she released a long, long stream of pent-up piss marinaded by a seriously fucked-up day. But
they
saw her.

She couldn’t see how the warmth of her release called to a hoard of starving spiders like a brilliant red homing beacon. In seconds, the branches of every bush and shrub around her hung low with the bodies of eight-legged eager mouths, all of them waiting to feed.

She did feel a slight tickle when the first brave spider crept up the inner skin of her thigh to follow the warmth. But she thought it was just her own water trailing aberrantly down her leg.

Until something bit her right where she normally only let Billy’s teeth roam.

She tensed, and began to rise, though she wasn’t completely through peeing. She reached between her legs with a hand to still the bite/itch and drew her palm back with the remains of a black-and-purple spider there, against the damp.

“Bastard,” she groaned. Her face twisted in disgust at the creature she’d crushed against the folds of her labia. “Fucker!”

She shook it off her hand and began to stand.

But at that moment, the spiders began to jump.

They landed in her hair and on her back and shoulders. They skittered down her waist and leapt up from the ground to cover her ankles and shins. They were everywhere. Like a swarm of ants over a spot of grease on a summer sidewalk. They fell from the darkness onto her mouth and crawled around her neck to tickle the lobes of her ears.

They covered her body like a deep violet skin, and they didn’t care when she maniacally batted and slapped and crushed dozens of them with her alarm.

There were hundreds more to take their place.

Casey opened her mouth to scream as the spiders covered her naked body like a shifting skin, creeping with delicate but pointed spider legs across her breasts and kissing with spider mouths against the pores of her pubes. But as she screamed, they entered her. From below and above, her mouths both nether and normal filled with the chitinous legs of spiders, though she coughed and cried and thrashed on the ground struggling in vain to spit them out. Her breath came in jagged wheezes as she struggled to breathe but at the same time tried not to suck them any farther inside her. The spiders ignored her flailing hands and frantic rolling and crashing through the fronds near the hut. All they saw was warmth. They smelled her heat. They hungered with a single mind to break through her skin, to drink the blood that flowed in panicked throbs beneath it.

They kept coming.

Part One

New Eyes

Often a person will stay in an abusive relationship because he or she feels that there is no economic way out. But that is more often than not an excuse that masks a deeper psychological pattern in the victim. Frequently there is a repetitious history in the type of relationships that such a person has entered. You can see it in women who are drawn again and again into relationships where the man has a need to dominate and subjugate the woman, particularly via sexual exploitation. The woman may actually learn to crave the abuse, despite verbally railing against it.

Some have suggested that the only way to break such codependent patterns is to completely change the environment and relationships of the victim so that she can be free to create new patterns, without any ties to the old.

—“Starting Over: Breaking the Chains of Co-Dependent Relationships”
Family Matters
, Volume 22, Issue 9, (2011) page 128.

“I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.”

—Voltaire

Chapter One

Passanattee

Monday, May 6. 12:30 p.m.

Rachel Riordan couldn’t stand listening to the two women any longer. She’d stopped by the Thai place for a quiet getaway lunch. The morning had sucked big time, and when noon rolled around, she’d just needed to escape the office for forty-five minutes and be in her own head. Instead, she’d been forced to live in the heads of the two college girls at the adjoining table—enduring every annoyingly chipper word of the exuberant conversation that ranged from crackpot philosophy to the weirdest sexual position. Modeling for college art classes, drinking at O’Malley’s after last call on Friday (in the alley), waking up with that really cute guy and finding out he was “still
really
cute—here look at his picture…”.

“Stop!” Rachel wanted to scream at them by the end of her “peaceful” lunch. “Wake up! The world is not a playground. It’s a slave pit of hard work. And guys are
not
gorgeous princes, they’re all assholes at heart, looking for their mother and a prostitute all in one. There’s something really
wrong
in that, yet nobody ever wants to talk about it. Yeah, sometimes after three drinks they look good at midnight, but eventually, they all reveal themselves as trolls.”

But she kept her mouth shut and tried her best to ignore the girls. She didn’t say a word to anyone for over a half hour, but it turned out to not be the most relaxing of lunches.

Then again, Rachel hadn’t had the most relaxing life lately. At least she’d finally gotten rid of Anders once and for all and set up house in her own place. She felt good about it. Free for the first time in years. So free she could draw in a deep breath and not feel a catch of fear/worry/anger in her chest as she did so.

But it still hurt to breathe freely, even if she felt relieved.

And when she looked at Eric, some of that pain returned. She knew he missed his dad, even if his dad was an asshole. What did he know? He was only ten! Of
course
he thought his dad’s bathroom humor and rough-and-tumble demeanor was fun. But Rachel needed a man who was ready to grow up. Not a foul-tempered, stormy kid who wouldn’t leave the pool hall behind and didn’t know when to keep his hands to himself.

She’d grown up, why hadn’t her ex?

Of course, she had to admit that growing up wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. These days when she saw the growing circles beneath her eyes and the straggly wisps of dark hair that snarled behind her ears and fanned out to slip beneath her shirt collar, she had to wonder what had become of that girl Anders had first met. That perky beach bunny she’d once been who lived in crop tops and knew just how to let her short spiky hair fall over her eyes to make a perfect come-hither, half-hidden gaze. That gaze had
always
worked. Blame the eyes (an ever-changing amber green) or the heaviness in the lips that formed her “I’ve got a secret” slanted grins. Blame that tight little bod that hadn’t stayed quite so tight once she’d had a kid.

Living with Anders for a decade had put lines on her face and a little too much to grip around her waist.

She suspected making it as a single mom was going to work some of the extra padding off. But it would probably put another couple circles under the eyes.

Rachel tossed a ten-dollar bill on the table and left the restaurant with the echo of the girls’ laughter behind her. She shook her head. They’d learn.

Probably too late, just like her.

The house was quiet a few hours later, when she pulled in the driveway. The front door was closed, and no lights were on even as dusk was settling in. Only a couple weeks on the new job and already she was working late. Didn’t bode well. Rachel grabbed her purse and hurried up the redstone walk to the front door of the small bungalow she’d rented.

She pushed the key in the lock, expecting to feel the knob turned from the other side, but instead, she turned the knob herself, pushed the door open and found herself standing in the shadows of her new living room.

“Eric!” she called.

No answer.

Panic threatened to close her throat before she called his name again. He was supposed to be here. He
had
to be here. Jeremy, the
eighth grader a few houses down had agreed to walk Eric home after school on weekdays and stay here with him until she got home. Easy money for the older boy. It had made her nervous to leave him with another kid, but Jeremy’s mother had assured her it would be fine. The boy was responsible, old for his age…and she’d be just a block away if they needed anything.

In her mind, she saw images of Eric wrapped up in duct tape in the back of a van, or lying bleeding, abandoned and beaten up on a playground. Hit by a car, unconscious, lying in a ditch. She saw her distraught face plastered on a movie poster with the tagline:
Gone…without a trace.

“Damn it,” she whispered, and walked through the small front room to the kitchen. “What was I thinking? How could I trust a kid with a kid? I should have known better. He probably forgot to even pick Eric up after school.”

That led to other, less fatal fears. What if Eric was still at school? What would they say to her when she came and picked him up? Would they even let her take him home, or would they call DCFS… She dropped her purse on the table and was already reaching for the phone when she saw the yellow slip of paper on the table.

Mrs. Riordan—I had to take Eric back to my house because my mom went to the doctor so someone had to be here with my sister. Hope that’s okay.

-Jeremy

The horrible fears and unfounded anger drained like water into a pool of embarrassment. She hung up the phone a minute, and took a breath. Why hadn’t they called her? The anger began to climb, but then she pulled her phone out of her purse and fingered it on. The first thing that appeared on the screen was
Missed Call From…