Go to the cages?
No, no, no! Find the keys, and then go to the cages.
Wesley hadn't seemed to be carrying the keys when he fell down the stairs. Which meant they were probably still in the upstairs room, unless he'd returned for them.
I dashed up the stairs. Most of them were pretty wet, so I kept a hand on the banister, ready to catch me if I should slip. But I reached the top without any trouble.
Though the hallway was lit, the bedroom was dark. I rushed in and searched the wall near the doorway until my hand hit the switch. An overhead light came on.
No keys on the rumpled white sheets of the bed. I snatched up both the pillows. Still no keys. Nor could I find them on the floor or nightstand or dresser. After scurrying around the room, I even dropped to my knees and looked under the bed.
Not a completely thorough search.
No luck. By then, however, I wasn't expecting to find them. Wesley had returned to the room, all right. He'd either hidden the key-ring, or taken it with him.
Taken the keys to the cages?
I rushed to one of the windows.
Seeing little more than my own reflection in the upper pane, I crouched and peered out through the screen.
Out beyond the moonpale front lawn, a small area of the jungle shimmered with an orange-yellow glow of firelight.
It gave me a nasty sinking in my stomach.
I muttered, "Oh, jeez."
And ran from the room.
Return To The Cages
On my way down, I took a fast detour and grabbed up Connie's fishing spear.
Spear in one hand, machete in the other, razor in my sock, I trotted the rest of the way downstairs and raced out of the mansion. I leaped down the veranda steps. I sprinted across the front lawn, leaving the lights behind.
From ground level, I couldn't see the fireglow. Too much jungle in the way. I was certain the glow had come from the area of the cages, though.
And wondered if I might be running into a trap.
Wesley seemed good at traps.
Maybe he wanted to play it safe just in case I should win against Thelma. Maybe he'd even watched us, and knew I'd taken her out.
And figured I'd be coming after him next.
Just his style, he might light a fire to draw me into position. But he wouldn't be at the fire. He'd be nearby, instead, waiting to ambush me.
With that in mind, I changed course. Instead of heading straight for the cages, I veered to the left and ran to a far corner of the lawn before entering the jungle. I went in fairly deep, then turned to the right and started making my way back.
I was quick about it. If Wesley had gone to the cages for some reason other than to ambush me, he needed to be stopped fast. There wasn't much need for quiet, either. With all the regular jungle noises, he wasn't likely to hear me crashing through the bushes. Not, at least, until I was very close to him.
When I spied the glow in the distance and off to my right, I slowed down. It seemed to come from a strange height, shining on leaves and limbs about ten or fifteen feet above ground level.
I couldn't recall any hills near the cages. Had Wesley climbed a tree and planted a fiery torch among its branches?
Reminding myself that he was probably not at the torch, I hunkered down and crept closer to the area. I listened for voices, but heard none.
I figured Wesley would probably jump me at any moment.
The last time I'd seen him, he had been holding one knife and wearing a belt with one empty sheath. There'd probably been a second sheath on his other hip, holding his other knife.
So I could expect him to be armed with two hunting knives.
At least. No telling what else he might've grabbed before coming over to the cages.
Not the ax, I hoped.
I hadn't seen the ax since our "last stand," when we'd used it as an anchor for the rope. Hadn't seen the Swiss Army knife since then, either.
Wesley or Thelma must've taken both those weapons.
The Swiss Army knife didn't worry me much. Though wickedly sharp, my razor was sharper. And the little pocket knife was outclassed, big-time, by my machete.
The ax was a different story, though.
If Wesley snuck up on me with the ax . . . or some major weapon I didn't even know about, such as a chainsaw . . . or even a gun . . .
No gun, I told myself. If he'd found a usable firearm, he would've started using it a long time ago.
Probably.
But God only knew what other sorts of weapons he might've found. If he'd looked in those storage buildings behind the house . . . A family that keeps a tractor mower might own a vast assortment of nasty tools: a chainsaw, a scythe, hedge-trimmers, a pickax, a sledge hammer.
Most of those, I figured, wouldn't be much worse than the ax. The ax had to be somewhere. Not in his hands, I hoped.
I'd seen, close up, the damage it had done to Andrew's head.
The ax really scared me.
Scared the living hell out of me until the moment I found out what Wesley did have.
Then I wished he'd had the ax instead.
Wait, wait. Time out. That was jumping ahead. The last thing I want to do is jump ahead -- bring myself closer to when I need to write about what's coming, anyway, much too soon for my taste.
I wish I could just skip the whole business.
I've come this far, though. I've already written about all sorts of nasty shit that hurt to write about because it was so disgusting or horrible or personally embarrassing. What's coming is worse than anything else, so far. I'd love to stop writing, right now, and avoid the rest.
That'd be chicken, though.
It's not as if I haven't known what's coming. For days, ever since I first started to write "The Rest of the Story," I've known how things turned out at the cages that night. I've known how painful it would be to write about. Now that the time is just about here, I can't just call it off. Even though that's exactly what I'd like to do.
I mean, it's the end of the story. I've gone through several ballpoint pens, my entire spiral notebook and most of a smaller notebook that I found in Erin's bedroom (everything is on Erin's paper since "Last Words' at the end of my journal) all to keep track of what has happened from the time Wesley stranded us on this island. I've probably spent some seventy to eighty hours writing. I didn't go to all that trouble just to go yellow and quit before telling how things came to an end.
So, here goes.
Sneaking toward the fireglow, I found myself in the bushes behind one of the seven gorilla cages. From where I crouched, the cage was only a dim, black shape. It appeared to be empty, but I couldn't be sure. The fire was still a good distance off.
Keeping the spear and machete in my hands, I crawled between the bushes and scurried across a strip of open ground toward the back of the cage. Before I got close enough for the bars to interfere with my spear, I turned to the right and hurried to the cage's far comer. I slipped around that corner. As I crept along the side of the cage, I looked through its bars.
The fire came from that direction. It was high and far away, as if Wesley had flung a blazing torch on top of one of the cages. The back-light let me see that the cage beside me was empty. So was the next cage down. The torch seemed to be directly above the third cage.
Much farther away than it might sound.
Each cage was shaped like a rectangle, about twelve feet high, fifteen feet wide and maybe twenty-five feet long. There was an open space of about five feet between cages. So the torch must've been some seventy or eighty feet away from me.
Because of the distance, my angle of vision and all the bars in the way, I couldn't see if anyone was up on top of the cage with the torch.
But I could see a woman inside the cage. Her face was anybody's guess. I recognized her figure, though, in spite of the distance, bars, and murky light. She stood near the middle of her cage, almost directly under the torch, her naked body half-concealed by shadows but unmistakably Billie.