fiction #6- "soucouyant" part 6.

they're baaaack...
and since i have the staged reading of pericles, then tomorrow is my first wax ever before i wash and pack for trinbago tuesday morning (stevie wonder live! i'm losing my fucking mind!) i figure i'll try to get another chapter in before we fly because we'll be gone a week and i don't know if i'll find my way to the internet, but i definitely know i won't have my stories with me. so i'll get some fiction up, hopefully post about the jazz festival and getting new ink while i'm gone (yes, i know that as an actor who needs to be changeable, 5 tattoos is already technically too many, but i can't help myself) and maybe be moving on to a new piece upon my return (since i won't be posting any story in its entirety) (and jake, or any other friends who want to read completed versions, email me so i can remail you the document).

"So they ask enough of the right questions to know bars wouldn’t be enough, but when people tell them the truth about what they wanted to trap, they insist no such thing exist. Meanwhile, we know they just feeding it. Two holes in the neck and a dry-out body could only be one thing, and the supply of fresh blood only making it stronger. But they refuse to believe. They tell themselves our stories don’t hold water and decide their research was more important. All I could say is the research companies must be paying a pound and a crown, because I sure as hell wasn’t staying there with three dead and the local guides deserted, trying to make a way to hold this thing they say they don’t even believe in. That is a special breed, staying there when they know something hunting them that they have no idea how to fight.
For the next week, every time they lose another one – which was almost every night – somebody would come down and call the next one to go up and join them. The science boys still don’t know what it is they want to catch, but the replacements determined as ever. They say it was their life work to learn and discover, and so they had to see and understand for themselves what this thing was causing all this damage.
They just couldn’t leave it alone.
The government get word about what they was doing by the third replacement-run and set up the same two representatives at the foot of El Tucuche, bright and early, to catch them on the next trip and tell them that what they doing is not sanctioned by Trinidad and Tobago and we would not be held liable – they were warned not to be up there without guides, but now they have a whole crew up there without permission, so their safety is not guaranteed. But the scientists say they going to proceed at their own risk and continue on their way back up.
When we see the reps' visit on the news that evening, the science boy who had been up there from the start was looking rough, like he wouldn’t last much longer. And every time somebody come down to fetch the next replacement, we hear they looking worse and worse. They turn fanatic about their project, telling whoever they pass along the way ‘how important this work is’ and how honoured they were to be going up. But it wasn’t like they understood the habits of the creature they were hunting. Every night they had another one gone and the survivors left with nothing but their fear in that cage they build.
By the end of that week, the six up El Tucuche were the last six; no more replacements and still nothing in the trap. We wasn’t sure yet what they build, but we was sure it wasn’t working.
Meanwhile it looking bad for Trinbago with all these scientists dead and missing with no explanation, and the government unable to produce the remaining ones. So they send the representatives again, up mountain this time, with the police to forcibly bring them down. Their respective countries wanted to know what the big secret was, and demanding their researchers back since they stopped getting reports from them. But of course, in true Trini fashion, the boss-man only send the same two representatives and two police. He figure after weeks in the bush chasing jumbies with colleagues disappearing left, right and centre, the science boys would be more than ready to come down now, and if not, they wouldn’t be strong enough to resist anyway. But again, he underestimate.
The news follow the entourage up El Tucuche, and come flying back down with footage of the damn crazy scientists tying up police and government reps right in front of what was apparently the trap. It looked like a big, mostly see-through box, reinforced with steel beams at the corners and along the walls, with a matching lid tie up with a thick wire-rope that they would have to drop down if they see anything in the box – of course by the time anybody was brave enough to go back there after the fuss die down, all they find was a big puddle of plastic melted into the ground over by the huts.
Well it was one bacchanal. The footage show them scrawny, hard-up-looking science boys explaining badly (too much technological terms) about this ‘entrapment and containment device’ they constructed and how they working shifts to observe it for any sign of activity. And they was only too happy to have the incident on tape. They tell our news-boys it was proper and necessary documentation of their work in process, and the arrival of the whole local crew was very ‘serendipitous’ because it giving them the opportunity to ‘implement a new plan’. And they only mention, as if it wasn’t that important, that this ‘new’ plan was to bait it with the police and representatives that went up there to talk them down."

walk good.