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Scylla
  by Marc Colten

  He added wood to the fire although the sun had just set and it was still light enough to see the smaller island. His camp was about thirty yards above the high tide line, against a rock wall where he could feel safe, yet he awoke every morning with a start, quickly checking the angle of the sun to make sure he had not somehow been transported across the strait.

  He began adding his day's harvest to the flames. He had spent the day, as he always did,
roaming the town scavenging discarded items and looking for odd jobs to sustain himself. Whenever he found the flyers stapled to trees or telephone poles he would rip them free and stuff them into his worn duffle bag. They took many forms including invitations to beach parties, festivals and antique sales. He had even found phony pleas for rescue floating along the shore sealed in bottles. What they all had in common was the need to get a boat, cross the strait and walk ashore onto the smaller island. Their numbers had increased in the past three years, perhaps as a response to his collection and destruction. Or maybe it was just to mock his efforts. 

  He had never seen anyone posting the flyers and his only confrontations were with
tourists who were reading them when he ripped the papers out of their hands. They tolerated him, of course, recognizing that he must be one of those colorful local lunatics they could safely ignore, unlike the ones roaming their streets at home. He ordered them not to take any more of the flyers and to never, *never*, go out to the smaller island. Some people listened to him, assuming that the smaller island must be where visitors were lured to be robbed. Others became convinced that the invitation they had found was all the more real because someone was trying to keep it all for himself. Why should they believe him? What did he have as proof, other than the scar he would always carry on his left cheek and jaw?

  He might have been the first to visit the smaller island because of a flyer, which were
much scarcer in those days. He had rowed his kayak across the strait and beached it. Almost immediately he saw her coming down the beach, dressed in shorts and a floppy t-shirt, her bare feet kicking up the white sand. She looked young, maybe a bit too young, but he was on vacation far from home and the rules didn't always apply. Still, where there was one girl there would be others. Then, just as she reached him, she smiled and swung from the waist giving him only a fraction of a second to react as the blade of the hunting knife flashed in the sun. She missed the artery but sliced across his face. The water rose to his knees as he staggered back, the blood leaking between his fingers. He fell into the water as he tried to pull the kayak free but his hands were slippery with blood and it would not budge. He pushed out into the water and began swimming back to the bigger island. He didn't know, or care, if there were sharks in the water. 

  All that frightened him was the thought of the girl swimming after him to finish the job. It took him more than an hour to reach the opposite shore and he lay there until after dark.

  The tourists would ask questions. Didn't anyone ever come looking for the missing
people? Wasn't there a pile of rented boats on the beach? How did she survive alone? Why
didn't she just leave the island on one of the boats? Why didn't the police go out there and arrest her? He tried to answer as best he could but he soon realized that they were laughing at him. 

  Sometimes, instead of convincing them, he just whetted their appetite for exploration. Then he'd beg them to listen to him until they walked away. From time to time, while making his rounds of the town, he'd hear a scream that might have come from the smaller island. Or maybe, he tried to convince himself, it was just a gull.

  For a time he had attempted to talk his way onto a tourist boat and leave, but he knew
now that it was never going to happen. Her brother ruled the bigger island as completely as she ruled the smaller and neither would let him leave alive. The only difference was that she ruled by pure force and he from behind the facade of the law. He was powerful enough to allow his sister's exile so close to people too terrified to let her live among them. He also had the power to keep him on the island to prevent him from spreading the story.

  He sometimes thought of gathering his strength, stealing a boat and returning to the island for a final confrontation. He tried to convince himself that with the passage of years she would have weakened and grown complacent as he grew stronger from his ordeal. Yet, every time he stood on the beach and thought of it, he'd begin to tremble and had to retreat to his camp. He knew that by now she was even quicker and more feral; the last vestiges of civilization discarded.  He knew he would never have the courage to face her again.

  He put the last of the day's flyers into the fire and watched them curl up and turn to ash. 

  Words appeared and then vanished. Party. Festival. Fun. By the time they were gone it was dark and he curled up in his ragged blanket and went to sleep. 



  The End