V. H. King's Ink

Thunderstorms and summer camp went together like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  You packed your poncho, you got out of the lake when there was lightning, and in a half hour the storm would pass.  Every now and then there was a real mess, with power outages and downed trees and frantic parents.  But when you were a kid, it was like something out of a movie—the world returned to some previous version of itself, before there was something called society.

That feeling of adventure and wonder is what had brought Gretchen and Sanders to Pultman’s Isle.  Childlike awe was so hard to find these days.  Two weeks traipsing around the jungle and splashing on the beach?  Not usually the kind of thing Gretchen would go for, but Pultman’s Isle was owned by the richest scientist-philanthropist in the world.  No one had seen Pultman in a decade at least, but the property was well-travelled by the curious.  You could take anything from the island as a souvenir—and that was the real draw, for Gretchen. 

Most people thought Pultman’s Isle to be more myth than fact—but it was on a map, and that was good enough for Sanders.  The legendary scream storms had piqued their interest too.  Nothing like it happened back home, which was one reason why it was considered up there with alien spacecraft. Scream storms—reportedly—were very much like thunderstorms.  Clouds, rain, lightning.  Except they also turned day into complete night and came with a few supernatural side effects. 

It was said that nightmares became contagious during a scream storm.  You could end up caught in someone else’s dream, or someone could show up in yours.  If you were lucky, the dream would fade with the storm.  There were reports of disappearances though.  Speculations were that others had gotten lost in their terror, wandering the isle until they became ghosts blown in the wind. 

There weren’t enough missing persons’ cases—or government agencies interested in all the red tape—to support that theory though.  Plenty of people came back from Pultman’s Isle just fine.  A lot of them even returned to the island, some choosing to live there in the off-season.  But there were still those unsolved mysteries, and all the little sing-song-sayings that crept into the back of your head when you were here…

Day 14

“Dammit Sanders, not that one!”

“It was the only rhyme I could think of!”

Your prayers didn’t have to be to a certain god.  Really, you just had to say mantras.  Manifest something other than whatever a screamer was trying to put in your head.  The problem was, screamers were listening—and if they wanted, they could loop you into the rhymes you said or the prayers you prayed.

“Do you want to be stuck in this scream storm forever?”

“No, I—“

“Don’t look at me!”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

The trick wasn’t to stay awake, but if you did fall asleep, you’d want protection from the screamers.  You’d never want them crawling into your dreams. And getting sucked into someone else’s nightmare wasn’t the fun vacation that the two of them had planned. 

Sanders closed their eyes against the beam of the flashlight.  Were those Gretchen’s curls they’d seen just now, or had that been a memory? Thin hair like filament, burning in a bulb.  Silver, streaked with blue.  Maybe that was just the afterimage, or whatever it was called. It wasn’t a ghost, right? Sanders hadn’t seen the eyes–they hadn’t looked. Sanders could remember Gretchen’s eyes though.  They could always remember his eyes.

“I had a dream about this, Gecko,” Sanders said.  “I had a dream a long time ago, but I don’t remember which one of us gets out alive.”

“Did you wake up?”

“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

Gretchen says nothing.  Sanders would know what his silence meant, if they were looking Gretchen in the face. Sanders waits. And waits. And then opens one eye, and is greeted by yellow mist.  You didn’t want that stuff in your mind.  You didn’t want to share a dream with a screamer, or even another stranger on the isle.  Not if you could help it.  And you didn’t want to get tangled in its mind, either. 

Sanders was certain that scream storms were sentient too, and not just the screamers themselves.  Not that they would say that out loud, especially on the isle.  Maybe they would never say it, just to be safe. 

Just in case. 

Pray.