“She thrives on blood?” Vanessa said. “Zoe, when did you start this? How? Why?”
“How? I was chosen, don’t you see? I knew the legend, good God, we all knew the legend. I used to love to come here and wonder what it was like in my own mind. And I sat here once and she came to me, and I knew. I knew what she wanted. She needed to be fed lots of blood. Then there was a bit filmed here for one of the history channels…let me see, that was four or five years ago. Bill was playing a bit part, and I saw that he would have loved to have been a pirate. It was so easy then….” She broke off, laughing softly. “We had to learn, of course. We started with a girl who was diving here…a Bahamian. We didn’t really know what we were doing and it was a very messy murder, but luckily, no one was around. And I’m so good with costumes and makeup, when the film that you and Jay were doing came up, well…it was just brilliant. Wonderful! We became pirates. Travis was easy. We terrified him before we killed him. And then we got on board the boat when Carlos tried to take Georgia away. Oh, it was so much fun. And the more blood Dona Isabella got, the more power she had, the more power she gave to us! But you! You went and found the trunk. That was very tricky, because we had to pretend to be just hanging around Key West while we caught up with that doctor and her assistant and stole it back, then got a boat and dumped it back out at sea…but we’re wonderful at getting rid of things in the sea. The sea is merciless, don’t you agree?”
“A year ago, you killed the people on the Delphi. And you just killed more people, those retired people, on the Happy-Me.”
Zoe appeared indignant. “Dona Isabella needed her strength for this.” She smiled. “Sometimes you have to seize your chances when they appear. Picking off retirees on boats that are just anchored here? Now and then you can have fun. You can do the whole pirate thing. Ghosts rising from the sea in flesh and blood with machetes!” She smiled, so proud of herself. “All you need is a place to run, excellent diving abilities and sheer talent. Oh, Vanessa! Murder is really ridiculously easy. The tricky part, always, was pulling off the crimes and then being back to appear to be innocent as hell. Actually, the hardest night was when we both had to slip out of our tents to catch up with Georgia and Carlos when they left that night. Catch up with them and get back into our own tents so we could wake up in horror and come see what had happened, what was lying on the sand. But it was wonderful!”
Zoe might have been describing an incredible trip abroad, or a loving sexual encounter. She appeared ecstatic.
Vanessa tried to keep her talking.
“Zoe, you need to stop now. I’ll help you. If not, you’ll wind up arrested. You may get the needle instead of life in prison,” Vanessa warned. She could still feel the prod of the gun so sharply against her back.
“No. Dona Isabella will protect me,” Zoe said. “Won’t you?” Zoe smiled slyly at Vanessa, then looked to her side.
Vanessa looked, too.
And there she was. The ghost of Dona Isabella, haughty, proud and cruel, and highly amused as they walked through the pines.
“You,” Vanessa said, “will surely rot in all the fires of hell, and soon.”
Zoe looked shocked. “You see her?” she demanded.
Dona Isabella looked furious. She spoke with a sultry voice, pleasantly, despite her words. “Zoe will kill you slowly, Vanessa. Slowly. You will bleed into the sand and into the sea.”
Zoe looked distracted for a minute. “Where’s Bill?”
“I’m sure he’s dead,” Vanessa said. “You think those men just let a boy playing with a gun stop them?”
The nose of the gun pressed harder.
Vanessa realized that they were coming through the trees to the other side of the island. When they reached the sand, she thought, she would be in trouble.
The moon was out, and they neared the water. She could hear the waves, the sound lulling. They were about to break through the trees. They did.
To Vanessa’s surprise, they came to a sudden halt. “Ah, well, if it isn’t the Spanish whore of all time!” came a voice.
Bartholomew. The ghost was awaiting them.
“Pirate scum!” Dona Isabella said. “Go—out of my way. Push through him. Just push through him. He is nothing but a mass in the air.”
“As you are,” Vanessa said.
She was stunned when the ghost swung about, when she saw hands of mist come toward her and encircle her throat. She felt the pinch…
And then she refused to do so.
“You bitch! You let her go!” Bartholomew said.
Zoe let out a little cry, thrusting Vanessa forward so that she fell onto the sand. She lifted the gun, but her hand was shaking as Bartholomew pitched himself at Dona Isabella and the spirits went flying downward in the night in a mist of white and sand.
And just as they did, Vanessa heard something like a whir, a motion so fast it seemed more ethereal than the ghostly specters in the sand.
Sean.
He flew into Zoe so fast, pitching himself from the trees, that she didn’t even have a split second to pull the trigger. She fell to the earth, and Jay, behind Sean, swept up her gun. Zoe began to toss and writhe and scream incoherently.
Sean kept her down.
Lew Sanderson walked out of the trail and approached the ghosts locked in combat on the sand. And he began to speak, too, some kind of an ancient dialect, his booming voice rising over Zoe’s desperate tirade and screams.
Then Lew’s words changed to Latin, and he lifted a cross, speaking the same words over and over. He reached into his pocket. From the sand, Vanessa stared at him, afraid that he had a gun, that he would begin to shoot needlessly at the mist…
But it wasn’t a gun. It was a vial of water, and he sprinkled it again and again….
Suddenly, a piercing scream of agony and terror erupted from the sand. Vanessa looked toward the sea. It seemed that her monsters had risen, but they were seaweed monsters of darkness and fire….
Black mist rose like fierce, roiling thunderclouds, seeming both unreal and with substance, a viscous mass that steadily came forward.
Dona Isabella stared at it, screaming in a rage. Words of protest tumbled from her mouth.
It seemed that thunder roared, silencing her.
She backed away.
But it did no good.
The darkness had come for her.
The black, roiling mass washed its way over the shoreline, an unstoppable army of oily shadows, somehow alive and furious, bearing red eyes that spoke of all the demons of hell.
Coming for Dona Isabella.
The mass enveloped her. She screamed and writhed, but to no avail. She became part of the mass, and it ripped her from shore, bearing her back to the water again.
Vanessa blinked. It was over; she was gone. Her heart flew to her throat because she didn’t see Bartholomew, either. All there was to be seen was Zoe, now suddenly silent, almost catatonic.
Lew turned to them. “She is gone,” he said simply.
Jay blinked. “Who is gone?” he whispered.
He didn’t know what he had seen. Now, as the waves lapped gently again, as the moon rode over the water, Vanessa wasn’t sure, either.
Lew Sanderson stooped down by Zoe. “I will take her. She will go to the Bahamian authorities,” he said. “And perhaps face charges elsewhere.”
Sean left Zoe to Lew.
He walked to Vanessa, caught her hand and drew her up into his arms. He was shaking.
“You know what I think?” he whispered.
“What?”
“I don’t need to think anymore. I know that I love you,” he said, and he drew her hard against him, still shaking as he held her there.
The remains of the Happy-Me were found the following week, and the Delphi was found two weeks later. Once in custody, Bill and Zoe seemed to have no problem talking, even though most of the law-enforcement officials they spilled their souls to thought they were crazy.
It was Dona Isabella. She taught them how to be pirates. She helped them slip aboard boats, kill the crew one by one and make them disappear into the ocean.
The film shoot had been so easy. They had made a point of switching places constantly, so that neither could really be accused. For instance, Zoe had made certain that Bill was working when she took down the Delphi, just as Bill had made sure that Zoe was seen at the time he lured Travis out to the sand during the making of the horror movie. Travis! Conceited oaf. He had died quickly and easily. And it was bizarre that the authorities had never found the machete that they had used to cut up the bodies—they had left it hidden in the pine forest on the island. They had sunk Jay’s boat—as they sank all the boats, stealing off them little by little. They weren’t bad people—they were chosen. They were chosen by Dona Isabella to help her rule the sea.
There were a dozen times when Vanessa wanted to turn to Sean and say, “Did that really happen? Did we see what we saw? Did an evil ghost walk the world just as easily as the pained spirits of those who had been wronged, or who sought to help others?”
She never spoke. Maybe they both knew that the world was composed of good and evil. As Bartholomew had suggested, good men were good men.
And evil men—and women—were evil.
Just how crazy had Zoe become?
And did it make them all a little mad?
They were questions that haunted Vanessa at first. But they weren’t about to stop her from living her life, from being with Sean. Barry healed quickly, and Marty was thrilled to walk around with a cane for a while. Liam came to before the authorities even arrived, furious with himself for having fallen prey to a pathetic little bastard like Bill Hinton.
But they had survived, and they had found a certain truth—if not the total truth. No one would really know what had happened on the pirate ship—and man might never really know what had caused hundreds of years of wild weather and strange occurrences in the Bermuda Triangle.
They didn’t expect to solve that riddle.
They weren’t salvage divers, either. They were filmmakers.
And so they became the filmmakers who worked with the salvage divers who brought up the pirate ship.