A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren Page A

don’t want to go in there
.
    Rachel ordered the dogs to stay, then: “Mary, wait here. I’ll go in.”
    Mary shook her head. “No. We’ll go in together.”
    Inside the door was a small foyer. On the wall opposite the door, Connie had proudly hung a painting, one of Rachel’s encaustics. Now it lay on the floor, its frame splintered, bone white gesso ground exposed in a hectic pattern of crisscross streaks.
    On the wall where the painting had hung was a huge hieroglyphic of a skull executed in spray paint in black and blood red.
    Mary pressed a hand to her mouth, gasping for breath, eyes closed to shut out that monstrous image, but the skull icon was limned in memory with a night of terrified flight.
    Rachel turned away, crossed to the double doors on the left that opened into the living room, and Mary swallowed at the constriction in her throat, fighting the resistance of her muscles. But again, she followed Rachel.
    Some maniacal beast had been unleashed in this room: furniture was overturned, smashed, slashed; bookshelves toppled; the white walls hideously muraled with obscene, spray-painted graffiti and stitchings of bullet holes; the cabinets where Connie kept her china and crystal empty, doors ripped off; the floor graveled with shattered glass and porcelain.
    Rachel’s whispered “
No
. . .” echoed in the silence, and the sheer agony in her eyes made Mary want to cry out. Then it was gone, and nothing took its place. Nothing.
    And where was Connie? Where was Jim?
    There on the far wall—that wasn’t just more demented graffiti. Spattered red brown and a curving, downward smear. Mary couldn’t see the bottom of the smear; the overturned couch blocked her view. She made her way toward the wall, glass grinding under her soles.
    Jim lay with his back against the wall, and he looked like something old and tattered that had been tossed away, his clothing and flesh riddled with bullet holes, caked with dried blood. Even his face had been smashed by craters of bullets.
    For a long time Rachel stood motionless, staring at Jim’s body, then without a word, she turned away, walked slowly toward the kitchen.
    Rachel, don’t go
in
there. Don’t go
. . .
    Mary followed her. And they found Connie.
    On her back on the floor, naked from the waist down, legs splayed, cold, dusky skin smeared with blood. Around her neck, the telephone cord cut deep into swollen flesh. Her face was bloated and purpled, tongue protruding, open eyes filmed like acid-dipped glass.
    Mary felt darkness suffocating her, and perhaps she screamed, but she didn’t hear it; she didn’t hear or see anything until finally she recognized Rachel’s face only inches away, felt the hard grip of her hands on her arms. But Rachel’s eyes were as devoid of life as Connie’s.
    She said, “Mary, we have to go back to Amarna to get the van.”
    And Mary accepted that not because she understood it—she understood nothing at this moment—but because it imposed some semblance of structure on the chaos in her mind.
    She didn’t remember the walk to Amarna. She was only vaguely aware that Rachel left the dogs there, vaguely aware after a passage of ambiguous time of Rachel backing the VW into the driveway at the Acres house.
    Rachel took the machete from the van, and Mary followed her to the back of the house and watched with neither comprehension nor curiosity while she hacked at the blackberry vines shrouding a mound of earth. Beneath the camouflage of vines, a metal door lay at an angle in the earth, brown paint rotten with rust. Rachel had a key for the lock. Together they pulled the heavy door back, hinges wailing. Under it, nine cement steps, another door. Rachel found the kerosene lamp and matches in the niche at the foot of the stairs. The yellow light went before them into a cell of a room. Jim’s radiation shelter. Shelves filled with boxes, jars, canisters lined