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stefanie_beanChapter 16: Welcome to New Otherton
Pairings: Hurley/Claire, Kate/Sawyer
Characters: Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, Benjamin Linus, Desmond Hume, Claire Littleton, Kate Austen, James "Sawyer" Ford, Rose Nadler, Bernard Nadler, Carole Littleton, Aaron Littleton, Background & Cameo Characters, Original Non-Human Characters
Rating: M
Length: 4520 words
Status: Complete
Notes: Fantasy and supernatural elements. Think American Gods on the Island.
Summary: Hurley is now Protector of the Island, while Claire, Kate, and Sawyer head back to our world. But when it comes to love, the Island has a way of getting you where you need to be.
Chapter 16: Welcome to New Otherton
The VW microbus rolled down the Barracks road which led straight to what was left of the motor pool. The garages were mostly reduced to debris, crushed by falling trees.
“What a mess,” said Hugo. “So, Ben, where to? This is your turf.”
“Head for the gazebo. That's the center point. We can decide from there.”
Hugo crept around the roof of a building which splayed across the path, as he steered clear of fresh earth churned up by the recent quakes. A few other buildings to the north of the motor pool had collapsed into splintered piles. Broken tree limbs blocked the road, and Hugo slowly veered off into the long unkempt grass, trying to avoid them.
The cafeteria and rec center were both intact. Threading his way over a cracked cement roadway, Hugo came to a dead stop at the edge of a wide grassy commons. In the center stood a yellow and white-painted gazebo.
Hugo and everyone else stared at the center of the Barracks, mouths agape.
About twenty people were milling around, or standing in clumps under the gazebo itself. Out on the lawn, large chunks of meat roasted on a open barbecue pit, sending up a tantalizing smell. A few people basted it with long leafy branches like small brooms.
One by one, heads turned towards the VW bus, and the crowd fell silent. One man held a small child by the hand. A young woman carried a baby, who gave a sweet, crowing laugh.
Hugo flung open the driver's side door. “Dude, I think I recognize some of these guys. They used to live on our beach.”
“Unbelievable,” said Rose. “You're right.”
The crowd came alive and surrounded them. Those not dressed in brown homespun wore short aprons of tanned leather, and a few had hats sewn from hides. Some had dressed up their leather patchwork with ragged remnants of their old clothing. There was a girl almost a teenager, and two boys who clustered together. Some of the people wore feathers in their hair, or flowers, and their feet were bare.
There, at the center of the crowd, Hugo spied a stocky grey-blonde woman of middle age, someone he had never expected to see again.
“Kathy,” Hugo called out. When he hugged her, her hair spilled out from under her hand-stitched hat. With her were the group of a dozen or so men and women, the rest of the survivors who had lived in the back of the old beach, then so mysteriously disappeared three years before. “I didn't even recognize you guys at first."
Kathy's answer was muffled by the bear hug. “We knew you'd be here. She said you would.”
Before Hugo could ask who “she” was, everyone else at once came into focus. The dark-haired girl with the baby was Sirrah. The tall yellow-haired woman using a crowbar to turn hunks of meat on the fire was Faith, and near her stood her friend Craig. Or maybe now her husband, because between them a toddler poked at the fire pit with a stick long enough to keep her safe, but which still let her think she was helping.
“Hey, Hurley,” Sirrah said. She hugged him as best she could, the baby strapped around her middle in a sling. The squeezed baby let out a squawk. “This is our little boy Lee.” Next to her stood Chen, more filled out in the shoulders now, dressed in a leather tunic stitched with sinew.
“Thought you'd disappeared for good,” said Rose. “What ever happened to you?” The three of them hugged, joined by Faith and Craig.
“It's a long story,” Faith answered. “But we're here now.” She knelt by the child, pointing to the adults. “Kiya, say hello to Hurley, and Rose, and Bernard.” When the child just stared up at Hugo with wide eyes, Faith said, “She's shy.”
“No problemo. How old is she?”
“Two and a half. We had her in August of '05.”
Hugo swiftly counted months and years in his head. So, how about that? Two and a half, just a little younger than Ji Yeon. Which meant that Faith must have started little Kiya right here on the Island, and the same for Sirrah's baby, Lee. They were all hale and healthy as you could want.
Once Hugo had thought he was cursed. That was nothing compared to what had happened to the women of the Dharma Initiative, and what had slopped over onto the Others as well. A real curse, laid down by Pele's mother Haumea.
Whatever the Dharma Initiative had done, it had to have been pretty bad.
Then it hit him. He had seen it with his own eyes in 1977, when the Dharma Initiative had drilled into that mine shaft, with disastrous results. Including killing Juliet. Whatever Pele's mom had fixed, she had to have done it over three years ago, because Haumea's curse hadn't touched Faith or Sirrah. These two kids were proof-positive of that.
A slender man with glasses and flyaway grey hair had barely approached, when Hugo grabbed him and swung him around. “Hey, Sullivan, you with Kathy too? How'd that happen?”
It took Sullivan a second to catch his breath. “After you split with Michael and Jack, man, things got bad at the beach. People were arguing, fighting all that next day. Everybody figured you and Jack and the rest were all dead. The next day, Locke and Charlie got into it over Claire. Kathy and company, they'd already gone, and nobody even cared.
“Something inside me just went snap. That night I put my stuff in a bag and headed out into the jungle. I wandered around for four, five days, and was I ever in a dark place. Then Meredith found me.” He pointed to a shy blonde woman who gave him an affectionate smile. “You know what's crazy? They said the birds told them where I was.”
“That's not crazy at all, dude.”
Kathy joined their circle. “So you, Rose, and Bernard, you're what's left from our old camp back at the beach, I guess.”
Before Hugo could answer, a shout came from the other end of the lawn.
Desmond loped across the leaf-strewn lawn, waving. “Hey, you made it, brother!” In his haste, he almost collided with a tall woman accompanied by two older children, who were heading towards Hugo at the same time. “'Scuse me,” Desmond said. “Don't believe we've met.”
“I'm Cindy Chandler,” she said, a trace of flight attendant formality in her voice.
Hugo said to Cindy, “Long time, no see.”
“A whole week, at least.”
“Hey, kids,” Hugo said to Emma and Zach, who returned the greeting with with shy smiles.
Hanging at the edge of the group stood some people who Hugo never expected to lay eyes on again, not in wildest imagination. Three years ago, four beach camp survivors had trekked up to the Barracks with Locke and Hugo. There was Sylvie, her mouse-eared hat only a little worse for wear. Jerome was missing his round coke-bottle glasses, and Janice's once-red hair was now grey-streaked black. All three of them clustered close, their arms around one another. Only one of their group was absent: the tall, gangly guy named Doug.
“We thought you were dead,” Hugo said, giving out more of his rib-squeezing hugs.
* * * * * * * *
Bernard, Ben and Desmond stood a bit apart from the crowd, watching the melee.
Ben kept darting glances over to his own house, on the other side of the gazebo. Somehow he had to slip away and take care of what was inside. How that was going to happen, with people meandering back and forth, coming up to greet him, plopping in the middle of the lawn as if it were some bizarre church picnic, was beyond Ben. In his imagination, Charles Widmore's and Zoe's bodies ticked like the beats of a tell-tale heart animated by guilt and grief.
“Looks like you made it, Desmond,” said Bernard.
Desmond grinned. “And there are more out in the valley, rounding up the cattle.”
“Cattle?” Bernard asked.
Ben said, “Mikhail had cattle. They must have gotten loose.”
“What you looking at, brother?” Desmond asked, scrutinizing Ben closely.
“Nothing." Ben quickly tore his glance away from his house. This was going to be harder than he thought. He felt suddenly weary, as well as desperate for this to be over.
At least Cindy was glad to see him. She broke into a broad smile, and a wave of relief washed over him, that she had gotten out of the Temple alive and well. An older woman stood by Cindy's side, also dressed in Temple homespun. With her were two children, a dark-haired girl of about twelve, and a boy Zach's age.
“I'm Darrah,” the woman said.
To Ben's embarrassment, he didn't know the children's names. “So who are you two?”
“Marian,” the girl said, a bit shyly.
The boy gave Ben a cheeky, cocky look. “Raffi.” Even as he spoke, he glanced around the Barracks, his dark eyes not missing anything. “Hey, Zach, look over there. It's that big, fat man.”
“His name is Hugo,” Ben said to Raffi. “Zach, Emma, I'm glad to see you're all well.”
The older children's tones were polite. “Hello, Mr. Linus.”
It hadn't surprised Ben that Cindy had left the Temple with Locke's group. Ben had spent many hours with Cindy when she first had joined Jacob's People, holding her hand while she sobbed and recounted the horrors of those first seven weeks after the Oceanic 815 crash, traveling in a forced-march under Ana Lucia's thumb.
Cindy did what she had to in order to survive. In that respect she was a lot like himself.
Hugo sidled up to Ben and Cindy, gesturing around the whole commons of the Barracks. “Isn't this awesome?”
“What?” Ben said, distracted.
“Everything. That all these people made it, especially the ones who got away from the Temple before Smokey showed up. And Kathy and those guys. They found Mikhail's cows and they herd them now, and the cattle are calving like crazy. That's why we're having barbecue tonight.”
“Hey, everybody,” said Kathy's friend Shana. “Dinner is served.”
Four picnic tables had been dragged near the pit. Great hunks of cow were hoisted onto platters, while Shana and Meredith loaded the tables with fresh fruit, bowls full of boiled breadfruit, some garden vegetables like tomatoes and carrots, and white rounds of cheese.
The group gathered slowly, as if animated by one mind. Even the younger boys didn't rush or grab. They waited, and everyone looked at Hugo.
After a second Hugo got it, and he blinked with nervousness. “I really suck at this. Ben, these were your digs. Help me out here.”
Trapped like a trap in a trap, Ben thought. The crowd moved aside, bringing him into full view. So much for slipping away. He might as well make the best of it.
He cleared his throat. His voice came out cracked and weak at first, then warmed and grew more solid. "We've all been through a lot in the past few weeks. All of us are survivors, whether we came from the Temple, or the jungle, or the beach. We survived mad things, insane situations that made no sense at the time, impossible events." Ben looked straight at Hugo as he said this.
"Some of us have been on the Island since birth. Some, like me, grew up here. Some of us were shipwrecked. Some have lived here for only a few years. Some of us left, then returned. But all of us here, to the man or woman or child, have survived. And for that, above all, we can be truly grateful."
He thought he was done, but Hugo nudged him to go on, so he did. “A lot of us didn't make it, though, and I want to remember them, too.” This wasn't so bad as far as speeches went. Either he was injecting just the right tone into his voice, or this was a soft audience. He could feel them warm up with each word. “We know we're surrounded by an invisible cloud of witnesses,” and here Rose nodded her head in firm agreement. Funny, in this case, it wasn't a matter of faith, but fact. “We won't ever forget them, especially the ones we love.” He saw with satisfaction that Hugo's eyes glistened with tears.
Unbidden, the childhood prayer spilled out before Ben knew it. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Amen.”
Hugo positioned himself at the head of the serving line. With Bernard's help, he began to pass out roasted meat.
Rose came over, wiping an eye. “That was beautiful, Ben. I knew you had it in you.”
“It was nothing.” Inside, black fear seized Ben once more. That pretty speech was just going to make it worse, when people found out what was really going on. Starting with the bodies in his house.
“You need to get yourself a plate, Ben,” Rose said. “Well, a banana leaf, I mean. You look shaky, like you've seen a ghost.”
“It's nothing. Go on, Rose. I'm fine.” Ben spied the small yellow house once more, and noticed the boards crudely nailed across the broken front window. Three years earlier, Hugo had hurled an ottoman through that window. In his arms he had gathered a half-conscious Claire, after Sawyer had rescued her from the rubble of her demolished house. The hole was there because, Ben remembered with sick embarrassment, neither he nor John Locke had planned to let Sawyer and Claire back into the house at all.
Other than the boarded-up window, Ben's house looked like every other one. The compulsion to dash over seized him again. If he didn't do something about this, he was going to lose it, and then the martyrdom he'd always expected, always had been convinced that he deserved would be upon him.
To Ben, it seemed as if Desmond could read right into his internal struggle. If anyone had a stake in this matter besides himself, it was Desmond. So Ben gave Desmond a small come-along nod, and Desmond followed him without speaking, kicking up the sticks and leaves which covered the long, uncut grass.
The two men stood in the chaotic mess of Ben's once-impeccable living-room. No longer were the books filed on the shelf by author and genre. Several pictures had been knocked off the walls, their glass lying in shards on the floor. Ben picked up one of Alex as a smiling, pretty toddler with a halo of curly dark hair.
“Your daughter?”
“When she was three.”
“Where's she now?”
“Dead at sixteen, courtesy of your father-in-law.”
Desmond ran a hand over his face, growing pale. “So she's the reason you tried to kill my wife, at the marina. When I kicked your bleeding arse.”
Ben hoped Desmond wasn't in the mood for a repeat performance. “I'm sorry. Genuinely sorry. If I can make it up to you in any way—”
Desmond's voice was flat as his expression. “Just get me home, Ben." He waved his arm at not only the room, but the Barracks, and the entire Island. “You know, if I hadn't seen all this myself, I wouldn't have believed it. A whole town. I spent all those years on this damned Island, although not damned anymore, is it? Three years, and never knew this was here. Never saw it.”
“You're lucky. You'd have crossed the pylons and your brains would have fried like eggs on the summer pavement. But you didn't come in here to marvel at the architecture, did you?”
“I figured you had something to show me.”
Ben sighed. “Indeed I do.”
“Or maybe, brother, you just didn't want to face it alone.”
It was true. “In here.”
Inky dark filled the hidden walk-in closet. Desmond grabbed a flashlight from Ben's desk, saying, “Let's see if this torch still works."
Ben fought for control, trying to keep Desmond from seeing his shaking hands. "This is going to be bad."
The flashlight did work, flooding the room with bright white light. Ben blinked, startled at what wasn't there. Even though Locke had cut Zoe's throat, and Ben himself had pumped a couple of rounds into Charles Widmore, there was no blood spray or splatter on the walls. Clean sweaters and shirts were still folded neatly in cubbies next to where Widmore and Zoe once stood. No stench of decay hung in the air. The desk drawer still stood open, its cash and passports undisturbed. The grey linoleum should have been coated with dried blood, but it wasn't.
Most astonishing of all, the bodies were gone.
Desmond swung the flashlight around the room, as if the two corpses might have crouched in the shadows. “My father-in-law was here, right?” The gloom made the wildness in his voice worse.
“Yes, he was.”
“Bloody hell.”
Ben reached for the flashlight. “Give me that." He tried to open the hieroglyph-covered stone door, which he'd used to “summon the monster,” but the door was wedged shut.
A nightmare vision seized Ben. What if Charles and Zoe had risen up, crusted with blood, eyes blank, and now lurked behind the summoning door, holding it shut? If Ben turned away, the corpses might jump out at them.
When the front door creaked open, Ben dropped the flashlight in terror. It went out with a small tinkle of broken glass. At once, the room grew as dark as a cave, save for the pale streak from the open bookcase-door.
“Hello? Ben? Desmond?” a woman called from the front room.
Ben felt his way out of the pitch-black room, Desmond at his heels. The evening light outlined the silhouette of a large woman, accompanied by a smaller, leaner one. He squinted, and after a few seconds made out Kathy and her friend Shana.
“We buried them,” Kathy said in a matter-of-fact voice. The way she rested her hands on her broad hips reminded Ben of his grandmother, the country one from Eastern Oregon. MawMaw could switch between wringing a chicken's neck and comforting a young boy with a warm bosomy embrace in a second. Like MawMaw, Kathy stood there in the doorway like an implacable force.
The vision of zombie Charles Widmore was hard for Ben to shake. “Thank you."
“I was going to bring him home,” Desmond said to Kathy and Shana.
Kathy said in a casual voice, “Back in 2004, Widmore was one of the top five hundred richest men on the planet. We've been out of touch for a few years, so who knows. Maybe by now he's made it into the top one hundred.”
“Fat lot of good it did him,” Shana added, glancing over to the spot where the bodies had been.
“We heard your story, Desmond,” Kathy went on. “About your yacht race, how you were doing it to curry Widmore's favor, how you'd gotten shipwrecked like Odysseus and fought to get back to your Penelope.”
“And you knew that how, hiding out in the woods and all?”
“The wood is full of shining eyes, the wood is full of creeping feet."
It sounded to Ben like a quote, although he couldn't place it.
Shana laughed. “Oh, Kathy, just cut to the chase. You know as well as we do, Desmond, that some of the birds around here aren't really birds. But they see and hear a lot. And they love to talk.”
“Aye, they do indeed."
“The birds were always tracking you," Shana said.
“They didn't put it together completely until they heard Widmore's name mentioned,” Kathy added.
“Father-in-law, though,” said Shana. “Didn't see that one coming. Of course, if you want to, you can always dig him up. He was pretty fresh when we buried him, but my guess is that he's fairly rotten by now.”
“Desmond,” Kathy said in a conciliatory tone, “Nobody wants to hurt you, or spoil your plans. When we arrived at this village the other day, we searched all the houses for supplies. Yours was the first we visited, and it turned out to be full of surprises. It's not every day one finds a priest's hole in the middle of a bungalow. So of course we investigated, and found the two of them. We did the decent thing.”
“Thanks, ladies." Desmond sounded only a little disgruntled.
Ben put more bitterness in his tone than he felt. “So, did you clean up the blood too?”
The two women looked surprised. Kathy said, “Blood? There was just a little on the floor, otherwise none, really.”
At Ben's silence, Shana changed tack. “So, Desmond, I hear you're leaving us.”
“Damn right I am.”
“Will you really be happy out there?” Shana persisted.
“What're you suggesting, that I stay here on this bloody rock?”
Kathy lifted her chin and looked Desmond square in the face. “If it's bloody, it's because people have made it so. What Shana is saying—”
“What happened to that man Rose and Bernard fished out of the well, who was all smiles?” Shana broke in.
“I dunno, you tell me.” Then Desmond gave a long sigh, as if the air had been suddenly let out of him.
Shana put her hand on his arm. “Listen, Desmond. Two days ago, we were pasturing our cattle in the North Mesa like usual, minding our own business. The Old Woman came to us, said we had to hurry to the Barracks, that you'd all be here, and we were supposed to make things ready. And here you are, just like she said. Then this morning, one of the birds told us what happened with Hurley. How you all went... There. To the Other Place. So this is what I don't get, Desmond. You've actually been There, so how you can still be so doubtful? It's as if you've seen, but not seen.”
Desmond knew exactly what Shana meant, but he pouted like an obstinate child. “Been where?”
“You know.”
He murmured, sounding defeated, “I don't know. It seems like a dream.”
“It wasn't,” Ben said in a sharp voice. “You still have your compass.”
Desmond reached into his pocket and gazed at the tarnished brass object as if he'd never seen it before.
“Maybe the compass isn't just to get home,” Kathy said, her voice rich with tenderness. “Maybe it's to find your way back, too, if that's what you and your wife both want.”
“Aye,” Desmond said, but he sounded unsure. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I'm going to see if any of that good red beef is left.” He slammed the front door on his way out.
Ben suddenly felt possessive and proprietary, especially since it looked as if he wasn't going to be living in a charnel house after all. In his mind he was already cleaning up the chaos, rearranging books, sweeping up glass, replacing the contents of drawers, and re-hanging portraits. Maybe even scavenge a window, replace that board.
Ben turned to Kathy. “So whom do I have to thank for the carpentry?”
Shana shrugged. “It was there when we got here. Maybe Janice did it. She and her friends lived up here for a couple of months, after you and everybody else left.”
“Poor Janice,” Kathy remarked. “Nursing two people through gun-shot wounds, can you imagine? Sylvie and Jerome both made it, though, even if Doug didn't.”
“Poor Doug, you mean. When we found them up in the North Mesa, by the flax fields, they teamed up with us.”
“You okay, Ben?” Kathy said.
Ben nodded, mute. It wasn't until he stopped shaking that he realized how terrified he'd been. Pulling himself together, he tried to sound as nonchalant as possible, while bracing himself for one more answer. “The babies... Everything... went all right?”
“You haven't met Jane yet,” Shana said. “She's out with the herds tonight, because we have some cows ready to calve. First-timers, both of them, so Jane just wanted to be around in case she was needed. She delivered Kiya and Baby Lee, too.”
Kathy added, “Jane's a real natural. Faith had a bit of a rough time of it, though.”
Shana shrugged. “Kiya's shoulder got stuck for awhile. Jane swore the Old Woman was right at Faith's side, helping her along, but none of us saw her.”
The Old Woman. Pele's mother Haumea, if what Hugo said was true. At this point, Ben had no reason to doubt it whatever. “But there were no problems, I mean. Neither woman got sick in the middle of their pregnancies, no symptoms, nothing?”
Shana and Kathy looked at each other, puzzled. “Why should they have gotten sick?”
“Surely at the beach camp you met Juliet—”
“Who?” Kathy said.
“She might have shown up after we left,” Shana explained to Kathy.
Then it hit Ben. Kathy and her band had abandoned the castaways before Juliet and Kate arrived, before Juliet started her mission to identify any pregnant women at the beach camp.
“I don't know what problems you're talking about, Ben,” Kathy said.
“Never mind,” Ben said in a low voice. “It's not important.”
“Well, then, I'm turning in,” Kathy said with clear relief in her voice. “There'll be plenty of time to talk things out tomorrow. You know, get organized around here. Too bad we didn't bring a conch.” She smiled like she'd just cracked a secret joke.
Ben's laugh was small, dry, and out of practice. “You've got to be kidding me. A conch?”
“I used to teach that book to college freshmen. Makes way more sense than having middle-schoolers read it. Of course, I did have to fill them in a bit about the Cold War.”
At once Ben liked this woman's genial self-possession. Maybe settling down in New Otherton wasn't going to be so bad after all. “My daughter Alex devoured it when she was twelve, as if it was the first book she'd ever read that she could completely relate to. I knew she was ramping up her adolescent rebellion when she started going around chanting, 'Kill the pig, slit her throat.' At first it was amusing. Not so much when she started calling me 'Jack Merridew.'”
Kathy gave a belly laugh, rich and deep. “One of my students told me that the conch trick would have worked if the stranded kids had had someone like me to keep them in line.” Her grey eyes took on a faraway expression. “That remark came back to me about a hundred times in the first week after the crash.”
“I tried to keep people in line,” Ben said in a musing tone. “Look at where it got me.”
(continued)
(A/N: The “trap” quote is from Dorothy Parker's 1944 short story, “The Waltz.” The “shining eyes” quote comes from the 1945 poem by Henry Treece, “The Magic Wood.” Kathy taught William Golding's Lord of the Flies to her first-year college students.)
Pairings: Hurley/Claire, Kate/Sawyer
Characters: Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, Benjamin Linus, Desmond Hume, Claire Littleton, Kate Austen, James "Sawyer" Ford, Rose Nadler, Bernard Nadler, Carole Littleton, Aaron Littleton, Background & Cameo Characters, Original Non-Human Characters
Rating: M
Length: 4520 words
Status: Complete
Notes: Fantasy and supernatural elements. Think American Gods on the Island.
Summary: Hurley is now Protector of the Island, while Claire, Kate, and Sawyer head back to our world. But when it comes to love, the Island has a way of getting you where you need to be.
Chapter 16: Welcome to New Otherton
The VW microbus rolled down the Barracks road which led straight to what was left of the motor pool. The garages were mostly reduced to debris, crushed by falling trees.
“What a mess,” said Hugo. “So, Ben, where to? This is your turf.”
“Head for the gazebo. That's the center point. We can decide from there.”
Hugo crept around the roof of a building which splayed across the path, as he steered clear of fresh earth churned up by the recent quakes. A few other buildings to the north of the motor pool had collapsed into splintered piles. Broken tree limbs blocked the road, and Hugo slowly veered off into the long unkempt grass, trying to avoid them.
The cafeteria and rec center were both intact. Threading his way over a cracked cement roadway, Hugo came to a dead stop at the edge of a wide grassy commons. In the center stood a yellow and white-painted gazebo.
Hugo and everyone else stared at the center of the Barracks, mouths agape.
About twenty people were milling around, or standing in clumps under the gazebo itself. Out on the lawn, large chunks of meat roasted on a open barbecue pit, sending up a tantalizing smell. A few people basted it with long leafy branches like small brooms.
One by one, heads turned towards the VW bus, and the crowd fell silent. One man held a small child by the hand. A young woman carried a baby, who gave a sweet, crowing laugh.
Hugo flung open the driver's side door. “Dude, I think I recognize some of these guys. They used to live on our beach.”
“Unbelievable,” said Rose. “You're right.”
The crowd came alive and surrounded them. Those not dressed in brown homespun wore short aprons of tanned leather, and a few had hats sewn from hides. Some had dressed up their leather patchwork with ragged remnants of their old clothing. There was a girl almost a teenager, and two boys who clustered together. Some of the people wore feathers in their hair, or flowers, and their feet were bare.
There, at the center of the crowd, Hugo spied a stocky grey-blonde woman of middle age, someone he had never expected to see again.
“Kathy,” Hugo called out. When he hugged her, her hair spilled out from under her hand-stitched hat. With her were the group of a dozen or so men and women, the rest of the survivors who had lived in the back of the old beach, then so mysteriously disappeared three years before. “I didn't even recognize you guys at first."
Kathy's answer was muffled by the bear hug. “We knew you'd be here. She said you would.”
Before Hugo could ask who “she” was, everyone else at once came into focus. The dark-haired girl with the baby was Sirrah. The tall yellow-haired woman using a crowbar to turn hunks of meat on the fire was Faith, and near her stood her friend Craig. Or maybe now her husband, because between them a toddler poked at the fire pit with a stick long enough to keep her safe, but which still let her think she was helping.
“Hey, Hurley,” Sirrah said. She hugged him as best she could, the baby strapped around her middle in a sling. The squeezed baby let out a squawk. “This is our little boy Lee.” Next to her stood Chen, more filled out in the shoulders now, dressed in a leather tunic stitched with sinew.
“Thought you'd disappeared for good,” said Rose. “What ever happened to you?” The three of them hugged, joined by Faith and Craig.
“It's a long story,” Faith answered. “But we're here now.” She knelt by the child, pointing to the adults. “Kiya, say hello to Hurley, and Rose, and Bernard.” When the child just stared up at Hugo with wide eyes, Faith said, “She's shy.”
“No problemo. How old is she?”
“Two and a half. We had her in August of '05.”
Hugo swiftly counted months and years in his head. So, how about that? Two and a half, just a little younger than Ji Yeon. Which meant that Faith must have started little Kiya right here on the Island, and the same for Sirrah's baby, Lee. They were all hale and healthy as you could want.
Once Hugo had thought he was cursed. That was nothing compared to what had happened to the women of the Dharma Initiative, and what had slopped over onto the Others as well. A real curse, laid down by Pele's mother Haumea.
Whatever the Dharma Initiative had done, it had to have been pretty bad.
Then it hit him. He had seen it with his own eyes in 1977, when the Dharma Initiative had drilled into that mine shaft, with disastrous results. Including killing Juliet. Whatever Pele's mom had fixed, she had to have done it over three years ago, because Haumea's curse hadn't touched Faith or Sirrah. These two kids were proof-positive of that.
A slender man with glasses and flyaway grey hair had barely approached, when Hugo grabbed him and swung him around. “Hey, Sullivan, you with Kathy too? How'd that happen?”
It took Sullivan a second to catch his breath. “After you split with Michael and Jack, man, things got bad at the beach. People were arguing, fighting all that next day. Everybody figured you and Jack and the rest were all dead. The next day, Locke and Charlie got into it over Claire. Kathy and company, they'd already gone, and nobody even cared.
“Something inside me just went snap. That night I put my stuff in a bag and headed out into the jungle. I wandered around for four, five days, and was I ever in a dark place. Then Meredith found me.” He pointed to a shy blonde woman who gave him an affectionate smile. “You know what's crazy? They said the birds told them where I was.”
“That's not crazy at all, dude.”
Kathy joined their circle. “So you, Rose, and Bernard, you're what's left from our old camp back at the beach, I guess.”
Before Hugo could answer, a shout came from the other end of the lawn.
Desmond loped across the leaf-strewn lawn, waving. “Hey, you made it, brother!” In his haste, he almost collided with a tall woman accompanied by two older children, who were heading towards Hugo at the same time. “'Scuse me,” Desmond said. “Don't believe we've met.”
“I'm Cindy Chandler,” she said, a trace of flight attendant formality in her voice.
Hugo said to Cindy, “Long time, no see.”
“A whole week, at least.”
“Hey, kids,” Hugo said to Emma and Zach, who returned the greeting with with shy smiles.
Hanging at the edge of the group stood some people who Hugo never expected to lay eyes on again, not in wildest imagination. Three years ago, four beach camp survivors had trekked up to the Barracks with Locke and Hugo. There was Sylvie, her mouse-eared hat only a little worse for wear. Jerome was missing his round coke-bottle glasses, and Janice's once-red hair was now grey-streaked black. All three of them clustered close, their arms around one another. Only one of their group was absent: the tall, gangly guy named Doug.
“We thought you were dead,” Hugo said, giving out more of his rib-squeezing hugs.
Bernard, Ben and Desmond stood a bit apart from the crowd, watching the melee.
Ben kept darting glances over to his own house, on the other side of the gazebo. Somehow he had to slip away and take care of what was inside. How that was going to happen, with people meandering back and forth, coming up to greet him, plopping in the middle of the lawn as if it were some bizarre church picnic, was beyond Ben. In his imagination, Charles Widmore's and Zoe's bodies ticked like the beats of a tell-tale heart animated by guilt and grief.
“Looks like you made it, Desmond,” said Bernard.
Desmond grinned. “And there are more out in the valley, rounding up the cattle.”
“Cattle?” Bernard asked.
Ben said, “Mikhail had cattle. They must have gotten loose.”
“What you looking at, brother?” Desmond asked, scrutinizing Ben closely.
“Nothing." Ben quickly tore his glance away from his house. This was going to be harder than he thought. He felt suddenly weary, as well as desperate for this to be over.
At least Cindy was glad to see him. She broke into a broad smile, and a wave of relief washed over him, that she had gotten out of the Temple alive and well. An older woman stood by Cindy's side, also dressed in Temple homespun. With her were two children, a dark-haired girl of about twelve, and a boy Zach's age.
“I'm Darrah,” the woman said.
To Ben's embarrassment, he didn't know the children's names. “So who are you two?”
“Marian,” the girl said, a bit shyly.
The boy gave Ben a cheeky, cocky look. “Raffi.” Even as he spoke, he glanced around the Barracks, his dark eyes not missing anything. “Hey, Zach, look over there. It's that big, fat man.”
“His name is Hugo,” Ben said to Raffi. “Zach, Emma, I'm glad to see you're all well.”
The older children's tones were polite. “Hello, Mr. Linus.”
It hadn't surprised Ben that Cindy had left the Temple with Locke's group. Ben had spent many hours with Cindy when she first had joined Jacob's People, holding her hand while she sobbed and recounted the horrors of those first seven weeks after the Oceanic 815 crash, traveling in a forced-march under Ana Lucia's thumb.
Cindy did what she had to in order to survive. In that respect she was a lot like himself.
Hugo sidled up to Ben and Cindy, gesturing around the whole commons of the Barracks. “Isn't this awesome?”
“What?” Ben said, distracted.
“Everything. That all these people made it, especially the ones who got away from the Temple before Smokey showed up. And Kathy and those guys. They found Mikhail's cows and they herd them now, and the cattle are calving like crazy. That's why we're having barbecue tonight.”
“Hey, everybody,” said Kathy's friend Shana. “Dinner is served.”
Four picnic tables had been dragged near the pit. Great hunks of cow were hoisted onto platters, while Shana and Meredith loaded the tables with fresh fruit, bowls full of boiled breadfruit, some garden vegetables like tomatoes and carrots, and white rounds of cheese.
The group gathered slowly, as if animated by one mind. Even the younger boys didn't rush or grab. They waited, and everyone looked at Hugo.
After a second Hugo got it, and he blinked with nervousness. “I really suck at this. Ben, these were your digs. Help me out here.”
Trapped like a trap in a trap, Ben thought. The crowd moved aside, bringing him into full view. So much for slipping away. He might as well make the best of it.
He cleared his throat. His voice came out cracked and weak at first, then warmed and grew more solid. "We've all been through a lot in the past few weeks. All of us are survivors, whether we came from the Temple, or the jungle, or the beach. We survived mad things, insane situations that made no sense at the time, impossible events." Ben looked straight at Hugo as he said this.
"Some of us have been on the Island since birth. Some, like me, grew up here. Some of us were shipwrecked. Some have lived here for only a few years. Some of us left, then returned. But all of us here, to the man or woman or child, have survived. And for that, above all, we can be truly grateful."
He thought he was done, but Hugo nudged him to go on, so he did. “A lot of us didn't make it, though, and I want to remember them, too.” This wasn't so bad as far as speeches went. Either he was injecting just the right tone into his voice, or this was a soft audience. He could feel them warm up with each word. “We know we're surrounded by an invisible cloud of witnesses,” and here Rose nodded her head in firm agreement. Funny, in this case, it wasn't a matter of faith, but fact. “We won't ever forget them, especially the ones we love.” He saw with satisfaction that Hugo's eyes glistened with tears.
Unbidden, the childhood prayer spilled out before Ben knew it. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Amen.”
Hugo positioned himself at the head of the serving line. With Bernard's help, he began to pass out roasted meat.
Rose came over, wiping an eye. “That was beautiful, Ben. I knew you had it in you.”
“It was nothing.” Inside, black fear seized Ben once more. That pretty speech was just going to make it worse, when people found out what was really going on. Starting with the bodies in his house.
“You need to get yourself a plate, Ben,” Rose said. “Well, a banana leaf, I mean. You look shaky, like you've seen a ghost.”
“It's nothing. Go on, Rose. I'm fine.” Ben spied the small yellow house once more, and noticed the boards crudely nailed across the broken front window. Three years earlier, Hugo had hurled an ottoman through that window. In his arms he had gathered a half-conscious Claire, after Sawyer had rescued her from the rubble of her demolished house. The hole was there because, Ben remembered with sick embarrassment, neither he nor John Locke had planned to let Sawyer and Claire back into the house at all.
Other than the boarded-up window, Ben's house looked like every other one. The compulsion to dash over seized him again. If he didn't do something about this, he was going to lose it, and then the martyrdom he'd always expected, always had been convinced that he deserved would be upon him.
To Ben, it seemed as if Desmond could read right into his internal struggle. If anyone had a stake in this matter besides himself, it was Desmond. So Ben gave Desmond a small come-along nod, and Desmond followed him without speaking, kicking up the sticks and leaves which covered the long, uncut grass.
The two men stood in the chaotic mess of Ben's once-impeccable living-room. No longer were the books filed on the shelf by author and genre. Several pictures had been knocked off the walls, their glass lying in shards on the floor. Ben picked up one of Alex as a smiling, pretty toddler with a halo of curly dark hair.
“Your daughter?”
“When she was three.”
“Where's she now?”
“Dead at sixteen, courtesy of your father-in-law.”
Desmond ran a hand over his face, growing pale. “So she's the reason you tried to kill my wife, at the marina. When I kicked your bleeding arse.”
Ben hoped Desmond wasn't in the mood for a repeat performance. “I'm sorry. Genuinely sorry. If I can make it up to you in any way—”
Desmond's voice was flat as his expression. “Just get me home, Ben." He waved his arm at not only the room, but the Barracks, and the entire Island. “You know, if I hadn't seen all this myself, I wouldn't have believed it. A whole town. I spent all those years on this damned Island, although not damned anymore, is it? Three years, and never knew this was here. Never saw it.”
“You're lucky. You'd have crossed the pylons and your brains would have fried like eggs on the summer pavement. But you didn't come in here to marvel at the architecture, did you?”
“I figured you had something to show me.”
Ben sighed. “Indeed I do.”
“Or maybe, brother, you just didn't want to face it alone.”
It was true. “In here.”
Inky dark filled the hidden walk-in closet. Desmond grabbed a flashlight from Ben's desk, saying, “Let's see if this torch still works."
Ben fought for control, trying to keep Desmond from seeing his shaking hands. "This is going to be bad."
The flashlight did work, flooding the room with bright white light. Ben blinked, startled at what wasn't there. Even though Locke had cut Zoe's throat, and Ben himself had pumped a couple of rounds into Charles Widmore, there was no blood spray or splatter on the walls. Clean sweaters and shirts were still folded neatly in cubbies next to where Widmore and Zoe once stood. No stench of decay hung in the air. The desk drawer still stood open, its cash and passports undisturbed. The grey linoleum should have been coated with dried blood, but it wasn't.
Most astonishing of all, the bodies were gone.
Desmond swung the flashlight around the room, as if the two corpses might have crouched in the shadows. “My father-in-law was here, right?” The gloom made the wildness in his voice worse.
“Yes, he was.”
“Bloody hell.”
Ben reached for the flashlight. “Give me that." He tried to open the hieroglyph-covered stone door, which he'd used to “summon the monster,” but the door was wedged shut.
A nightmare vision seized Ben. What if Charles and Zoe had risen up, crusted with blood, eyes blank, and now lurked behind the summoning door, holding it shut? If Ben turned away, the corpses might jump out at them.
When the front door creaked open, Ben dropped the flashlight in terror. It went out with a small tinkle of broken glass. At once, the room grew as dark as a cave, save for the pale streak from the open bookcase-door.
“Hello? Ben? Desmond?” a woman called from the front room.
Ben felt his way out of the pitch-black room, Desmond at his heels. The evening light outlined the silhouette of a large woman, accompanied by a smaller, leaner one. He squinted, and after a few seconds made out Kathy and her friend Shana.
“We buried them,” Kathy said in a matter-of-fact voice. The way she rested her hands on her broad hips reminded Ben of his grandmother, the country one from Eastern Oregon. MawMaw could switch between wringing a chicken's neck and comforting a young boy with a warm bosomy embrace in a second. Like MawMaw, Kathy stood there in the doorway like an implacable force.
The vision of zombie Charles Widmore was hard for Ben to shake. “Thank you."
“I was going to bring him home,” Desmond said to Kathy and Shana.
Kathy said in a casual voice, “Back in 2004, Widmore was one of the top five hundred richest men on the planet. We've been out of touch for a few years, so who knows. Maybe by now he's made it into the top one hundred.”
“Fat lot of good it did him,” Shana added, glancing over to the spot where the bodies had been.
“We heard your story, Desmond,” Kathy went on. “About your yacht race, how you were doing it to curry Widmore's favor, how you'd gotten shipwrecked like Odysseus and fought to get back to your Penelope.”
“And you knew that how, hiding out in the woods and all?”
“The wood is full of shining eyes, the wood is full of creeping feet."
It sounded to Ben like a quote, although he couldn't place it.
Shana laughed. “Oh, Kathy, just cut to the chase. You know as well as we do, Desmond, that some of the birds around here aren't really birds. But they see and hear a lot. And they love to talk.”
“Aye, they do indeed."
“The birds were always tracking you," Shana said.
“They didn't put it together completely until they heard Widmore's name mentioned,” Kathy added.
“Father-in-law, though,” said Shana. “Didn't see that one coming. Of course, if you want to, you can always dig him up. He was pretty fresh when we buried him, but my guess is that he's fairly rotten by now.”
“Desmond,” Kathy said in a conciliatory tone, “Nobody wants to hurt you, or spoil your plans. When we arrived at this village the other day, we searched all the houses for supplies. Yours was the first we visited, and it turned out to be full of surprises. It's not every day one finds a priest's hole in the middle of a bungalow. So of course we investigated, and found the two of them. We did the decent thing.”
“Thanks, ladies." Desmond sounded only a little disgruntled.
Ben put more bitterness in his tone than he felt. “So, did you clean up the blood too?”
The two women looked surprised. Kathy said, “Blood? There was just a little on the floor, otherwise none, really.”
At Ben's silence, Shana changed tack. “So, Desmond, I hear you're leaving us.”
“Damn right I am.”
“Will you really be happy out there?” Shana persisted.
“What're you suggesting, that I stay here on this bloody rock?”
Kathy lifted her chin and looked Desmond square in the face. “If it's bloody, it's because people have made it so. What Shana is saying—”
“What happened to that man Rose and Bernard fished out of the well, who was all smiles?” Shana broke in.
“I dunno, you tell me.” Then Desmond gave a long sigh, as if the air had been suddenly let out of him.
Shana put her hand on his arm. “Listen, Desmond. Two days ago, we were pasturing our cattle in the North Mesa like usual, minding our own business. The Old Woman came to us, said we had to hurry to the Barracks, that you'd all be here, and we were supposed to make things ready. And here you are, just like she said. Then this morning, one of the birds told us what happened with Hurley. How you all went... There. To the Other Place. So this is what I don't get, Desmond. You've actually been There, so how you can still be so doubtful? It's as if you've seen, but not seen.”
Desmond knew exactly what Shana meant, but he pouted like an obstinate child. “Been where?”
“You know.”
He murmured, sounding defeated, “I don't know. It seems like a dream.”
“It wasn't,” Ben said in a sharp voice. “You still have your compass.”
Desmond reached into his pocket and gazed at the tarnished brass object as if he'd never seen it before.
“Maybe the compass isn't just to get home,” Kathy said, her voice rich with tenderness. “Maybe it's to find your way back, too, if that's what you and your wife both want.”
“Aye,” Desmond said, but he sounded unsure. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I'm going to see if any of that good red beef is left.” He slammed the front door on his way out.
Ben suddenly felt possessive and proprietary, especially since it looked as if he wasn't going to be living in a charnel house after all. In his mind he was already cleaning up the chaos, rearranging books, sweeping up glass, replacing the contents of drawers, and re-hanging portraits. Maybe even scavenge a window, replace that board.
Ben turned to Kathy. “So whom do I have to thank for the carpentry?”
Shana shrugged. “It was there when we got here. Maybe Janice did it. She and her friends lived up here for a couple of months, after you and everybody else left.”
“Poor Janice,” Kathy remarked. “Nursing two people through gun-shot wounds, can you imagine? Sylvie and Jerome both made it, though, even if Doug didn't.”
“Poor Doug, you mean. When we found them up in the North Mesa, by the flax fields, they teamed up with us.”
“You okay, Ben?” Kathy said.
Ben nodded, mute. It wasn't until he stopped shaking that he realized how terrified he'd been. Pulling himself together, he tried to sound as nonchalant as possible, while bracing himself for one more answer. “The babies... Everything... went all right?”
“You haven't met Jane yet,” Shana said. “She's out with the herds tonight, because we have some cows ready to calve. First-timers, both of them, so Jane just wanted to be around in case she was needed. She delivered Kiya and Baby Lee, too.”
Kathy added, “Jane's a real natural. Faith had a bit of a rough time of it, though.”
Shana shrugged. “Kiya's shoulder got stuck for awhile. Jane swore the Old Woman was right at Faith's side, helping her along, but none of us saw her.”
The Old Woman. Pele's mother Haumea, if what Hugo said was true. At this point, Ben had no reason to doubt it whatever. “But there were no problems, I mean. Neither woman got sick in the middle of their pregnancies, no symptoms, nothing?”
Shana and Kathy looked at each other, puzzled. “Why should they have gotten sick?”
“Surely at the beach camp you met Juliet—”
“Who?” Kathy said.
“She might have shown up after we left,” Shana explained to Kathy.
Then it hit Ben. Kathy and her band had abandoned the castaways before Juliet and Kate arrived, before Juliet started her mission to identify any pregnant women at the beach camp.
“I don't know what problems you're talking about, Ben,” Kathy said.
“Never mind,” Ben said in a low voice. “It's not important.”
“Well, then, I'm turning in,” Kathy said with clear relief in her voice. “There'll be plenty of time to talk things out tomorrow. You know, get organized around here. Too bad we didn't bring a conch.” She smiled like she'd just cracked a secret joke.
Ben's laugh was small, dry, and out of practice. “You've got to be kidding me. A conch?”
“I used to teach that book to college freshmen. Makes way more sense than having middle-schoolers read it. Of course, I did have to fill them in a bit about the Cold War.”
At once Ben liked this woman's genial self-possession. Maybe settling down in New Otherton wasn't going to be so bad after all. “My daughter Alex devoured it when she was twelve, as if it was the first book she'd ever read that she could completely relate to. I knew she was ramping up her adolescent rebellion when she started going around chanting, 'Kill the pig, slit her throat.' At first it was amusing. Not so much when she started calling me 'Jack Merridew.'”
Kathy gave a belly laugh, rich and deep. “One of my students told me that the conch trick would have worked if the stranded kids had had someone like me to keep them in line.” Her grey eyes took on a faraway expression. “That remark came back to me about a hundred times in the first week after the crash.”
“I tried to keep people in line,” Ben said in a musing tone. “Look at where it got me.”
(continued)
(A/N: The “trap” quote is from Dorothy Parker's 1944 short story, “The Waltz.” The “shining eyes” quote comes from the 1945 poem by Henry Treece, “The Magic Wood.” Kathy taught William Golding's Lord of the Flies to her first-year college students.)