2. Night Of The Lizards
The town nearest the cabin is called Vulture's Hole. It's little more than a ghost town now. The people there are old and tired. They weren't always. Not all that long ago, they talked about their friends...they talked about a boy who used to often visit the town. They weren't sure of his name, but they remembered his hair...bright red. His father was mad, they said, and lived in a cabin out in the desert, digging holes in the sand for no reason. The boy would buy food from them. Now, the man steals the food instead.
They let him get away with it. They know him better than he does. The last time they saw him happy was when he married Mercy. She was mad too. She lived in the middle of town, with ordinary parents and an ordinary life. But she was frightening. They said she was a witch. They were probably right. They remembered one night when she went missing. Her parents called the whole town together to find her. They found her in the desert in a lizard nest. But she hadn't been bitten, she wasn't dead. And she hadn't eaten a single onion. There was no reason for them not to bite her. Onion Girl they called her, but she didn't like the name.
They made a strange couple. They went to live with the insane father in the desert. People said they had children, daughters who they were hiding from the world. Often people talked about driving their car out there and seeing for themselves just what was going on. But no-one ever did.
Until old George went out there.
The town breeds weirdos, the people there have become accustomed to this by now. It was foolish of George to go there, but he did. And he came back.
He said they had two girls. One, the oldest, with black hair and tired
eyes. And the other with her father's red hair. She was frightened of him.
She wanted him to go away. She said her grandfather had said things about
people like him.
George planned to tell someone about the girls. He said they couldn't
stay there, not with parents like that. He said they made the girls dig,
from morning until night, and they told them lies about people and would
never let them go.
It was night. George went to sleep. He remembered the girl with bright blonde hair and what she did. He knew she was dead, although he didn't know how he knew. He remembered the boy the girl was in love with, and what she did because of him. He thought of them, thought of Kate and Sam, and what they started. They defied the cruel rules, they fell in love, they were supposed to love each other forever and change all the rules.
The result? Both dead. Many others dead as well. A family...if they could be called that...living a life made up only of revenge. All trapped in an awful circle that it would take something spectacular to break.
George shivered, because love had led to this, and there wasn't any turning back.
That night the lizards came. They killed George, and they killed others too. The lizards were cold and indiscriminating, like Kate had been. They killed many...adults and children, black and white. There was screaming that night, screaming that disturbed the redheaded girl's dreams as she slept in the family car. Parents screamed for their children, friends screamed for friends, and lizard blood covered the town for days. Many people left the morning after, getting into their cars with white faces, clutching onto what they had left. The ones that remain will hardly talk about that night. They might...but only might...mention that those who were there on that night and not dead saw someone in the town, standing on the old gallows with the broken rope, and she was the one who sent the lizards. The witch who wanted to protect her daughters. The girl with the black hair.
They never saw her again.
But she's still alive and living in the cabin with her family. She decided a long time ago that she loved her daughters, and she would protect them no matter what the cost. The cost turned out to be the lives of almost an entire town, but she didn't mind, because the townspeople had never been nice to her. They had thought her mad, after all. But they were the mad ones. They used to kill and enslave people because they had different colour skin, and they had no answer when she questioned why.
She does not remember the blonde-haired girl, who didn't have an answer either and threw her life away trying to find one. It is quite odd, though, that she does not remember Kate, because Kate is the one who they are meant to hate so much. Her father-in-law, the girl's grandfather, the mad one, hates her because she rejected him in favour of someone far beneath him. Her husband hates her because she drove his father mad. The girls hate her because she did this to them, she made them dig, she made them slaves. They will never find the treasure, they are not pure of heart enough, someone else, someone better will find it, they are just living out a curse. Unless they choose to take destiny into their own hands, of course.
They may, or they may not.
Mercy does not hate Kate Barlow. She finds no good reason to. She sits in the shade and eats chocolate. The girls dig nearby.
Looking at them, it would be hard to tell they were sisters. One has black hair and the other red, and one has blue eyes and the other green. They don't speak to each other much, either. They certainly never play games or laugh. When their grandmother was alive, she made them laugh sometimes. She would teach them how to catch rattlesnakes and drain the poison out of them, and she would laugh while the snakes shuddered in her hands. But she's dead now. She died when the youngest was just five.
She told them stories sometimes. Stories about her life at Green Lake. Stories about back when this place was known as heaven on earth and there were parties instead of dust. It went wrong because of Kate, she said.
When she said that, her husband spoke up: It went wrong because God punished us for what she did.
Their grandmother, the one who the little girl took after most, shook her dying head at this: It went wrong because God agreed with her and not us, she said.
And the two girls would listen and they wouldn't understand, and they wouldn't understand when their grandfather would shout and scream filthy swear words at them, and they wouldn't understand when their father started doing the same.
And when the man came to the door, the tall, dark and frightening man, they didn't understand why he was nice to them, because their grandfather had warned them about his kind, and they didn't understand why their mother disappeared in the middle of the night and came back with lizard blood on her.
The girls keep digging.
The lizards watch them with yellow eyes, and stay away.
Because darkness comes in many forms, after all.