White and Other Tales of Ruin (39 page)

As he watched Max beginning his descent, Roddy started shaking. Something squirmed in his stomach, scraping at his insides with claws so sharp that he wondered whether he’d swallowed something else along with the water from the jungle leaves. Every step they took, their route was becoming more difficult. Plants sprang out of nowhere, rocks sharpened themselves on their fear, trees melded trunks to form almost impenetrable barriers. Everything conspired to make their progress more hazardous.

Yet he felt guided, by an insistent and heavy hand.

He knelt down gently, head swimming, and then he knew that he had been brought here to die on this small cliff. He would fall and smash his skull on the rocks below, and while Max tried to scoop his brains back into his head Roddy would look up at the sky, and see a moon he did not recognise slowly appearing against the blue, a ghost emerging from the mist, mocking him as his world went dark.

“
Roddy!” Max called. The others were already scrambling down the slope, and before his panic could take hold Roddy slipped and slid down to the gully floor. He did not fall, he did not die, but neither did he feel elated. He sensed the land laughing at him, amusing itself with the mild deceit it had planted in his mind. The stream was the sound of that laughter.

It was gently flowing, cool and fresh, and at its deepest it came up to their chests. It twisted and turned in its little valley, disappearing downstream around a rocky corner curtained by overhanging plants. The men stripped and bathed. There were no dead things here. Perhaps the remains on the beach had been drowned further downstream, to deter any visitors from venturing inland. But here, the air was clear of the taint of decomposition, and the sun still found its way through the leaves and branches to speckle their damaged skin.

The water was fresh. Butch tasted it, then gulped it down. Even Norris smiled and refrained from passing some derisory comment.

“
Water, water, everywhere,” Max said. Roddy smiled, because he knew what Max meant, and Norris grinned in confused acknowledgement of his eventual acceptance. They all drank and swam, and washed away dried blood and caked dirt.

When they had finished, they climbed from the gentle waters to lie out on the bank and let the sun dry them. Butch remained in the stream. He bobbed in the current, floating a few feet, standing, doing it again.

The surge came from nowhere. Without even a sigh to announce its appearance, as if air and water conspired to fool the men’s senses. Butch turned and stared upstream at the rolling, tumbling, refuse-laden wave of water ploughing towards him. It frothed, like a rabid sea monster angry at the irony of its affliction.

Roddy stood, absurdly conscious of his nakedness. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He felt a draining flush of hopelessness, the same feeling he had experienced watching his ship split and sink. No hope, he had thought to himself then, no hope at all for anyone left inside.

Now he thought the same. Except he whispered it as well, like a prayer to the dying. “No hope.”

Just before the water lifted Butch from the stream bed, he glanced at Roddy, and suddenly his eyes were very calm, his expression one of equanimity rather than fear. It was a split second, the blink of an eye, because then the wave swallowed him in a flurry of limbs. His head broke surface several times, but he could only utter bubbles. The men watched helplessly as Butch was tumbled away from them, mixed in with the wood and weed and dead things also carried along by the surge.

Roddy started running along the bank. Stones snapped at his bare feet. Breath caught in his throat, possessed of sharp edges. But Butch was firmly in the water’s grasp, and it held him close and low, attempting to drown him even before he struck the wall of the gully further downstream. Roddy tried to shout, but his voice was lost in the angry white-water roar. He sensed the others following him. Their company made it all seem more futile.

He could have made it, Roddy thought. He could have swum to shore. It was impossible, of course. But it seemed that for Butch, even the intention to survive had been absent.

In the waters, jumping from the foam, speckled red for brief instants, Roddy was sure he saw tiny snapping things. It may have been the boiling water itself, spinning Butch in its violent grasp. Or it could have been something in the water with Butch, but surviving there, belonging there, revelling in the violence.

Butch was swept under the overhanging trees and plants, just before the stream twisted out of sight. For the instant before he was pummelled into protruding rocks Roddy saw him, eyes closed, mouth wide open. His bruised face had been struck by something, and he was drowning in blood as well as water.

The wave struck the rocks, scouring its contents across the blackening surface, then surged away downstream. It left behind its load, floating in the suddenly calm waters: a tree branch, stripped of bark; a bird of paradise, bobbing like a drowned rainbow; and Butch, still spread on the rocks, his snapped left arm wedged into a crack and holding him there.

His head lolled. He looked like he was falling asleep, and at any moment Roddy expected him to look up and his bashful grin to appear. His head fell lower, however, until his chin rested on his chest. And then they could see the damage to the back of his head, and Roddy knew that he would never be smiling again.

They had to cross the stream to reach him. Roddy could not bring himself to enter the water, even though it was back to its normal self, as if the bore had never been. He wanted to mention the snapping things he had seen, but he felt foolish; there were no apparent bites on Butch’s body, only cuts and scrapes. He watched nervously as Max and Norris waded across, arms held wide for balance.

Max paused in front of Butch, his attention focussed on whatever was beyond the rocky outcrop around which the stream disappeared. He was still for a long time. Roddy was on the verge of splashing out to him, shaking him awake and shouting at him, when he turned.

“
No sign of the wave downstream,” Max said casually. He looked briefly back upstream, indicating to Roddy the wet, scoured banks where the freak surge had made its mark. Norris seemed not to hear, or understand the implication. He was staring at Butch, disgust stretching his face out of shape.

Roddy was glad he had not gone in. This was not a normal stream, not like the ones in the forests and valleys back home. It was a wrong stream, one which could conjure a wave from nowhere and then suck it back into itself, without having to spread it further along its length. It was flowing at its normal gentle rate once more, carrying away the detritus left behind. The colourful dead bird spun slowly as it headed for the beach.

Roddy thought the wave must be waiting somewhere. Tucked on the stream bed, pressure building, ready to appear again when the time was right. Like now, while Max and Norris were trying to free Butch’s trapped arm without touching the bone protruding through the skin.

But perhaps that would be too easy.

“
Get him out,” Roddy said, “get him out, now, get him out.” He rocked from side to side, wincing at the pain from his gashed feet but enjoying the sensation at the same time. It told him he was still alive, his brain was connected. He looked down at his pathetic body. His ribs corrugated his skin and his feet bled onto the rocks. His blood was a black splash on the ground. It seeped between stones and was sucked in quickly, the land as desperate for sustenance as they were.

The two men eventually backed across the stream with Butch trailing between them. Norris seemed frantic to keep Butch’s head up out of the water, as if a dead man could drown. They reached the bank and Roddy helped them haul the body out. They lay Butch down on the wet rocks. His head was leaking.

Roddy had seen worse sights than this when the ship sank, but now it was different. Just as Ernie’s death had hit them badly, the sight of Butch lying cooling in this cruel place felt like a punch to the chest. He had been a survivor, one of only a few left from the ship’s crew. He had been valuable. A
friend
.

“
Just where the hell did that wave come from?” Norris asked. “What caused it? There aren’t any clouds, no rain. The stream’s back to its normal level. I didn’t feel...” He prattled on, but Roddy soon cut out his voice. He was becoming aware of the expression on Max’s face.

The big man looked defeated. His arms hung by his sides, shoulders slumped, water dripping from his ears and nose to splash into rosettes on the rocks around him. Pinkish sweat, coloured with his own blood, dribbled down his forehead and around his ears. The burns and scabs on his head were open to the elements. His eyes were shaded from the sun. They looked dead.

“
Max?” Roddy said, and Norris shut up. “Max.”

Max turned and looked at them, and Roddy saw that some of the drops were tears. The big man was crying. They were silent, unforced, trickling salt-water into his wounds. “He was only a kid,” Max said. “How old was he? How old was Butch?”

Roddy shrugged. “Nineteen?”

Max nodded. “Just a kid.”

“
Where did that wave come from?” Norris said again, now that the silence held their attention.

Max looked back down at Butch, shaking his head slowly, hands fisted. “Something very wrong,” he said.

“
The wave, though,” Norris whined.

“
Something very wrong with this place.” Max turned and went back to where they had dumped their clothes. He hauled on his trousers and shirt, wincing as aches and pains lit up his body. He said no more.

Roddy remembered an occasion several years ago, when he had been more scared than at any time in his life. One of his friends had borrowed his father’s motorbike and offered to take Roddy for a ride. Once committed, there was no backing out. At each jerky change of gear, Roddy was sure he was going to be flung off backwards, smashing his head like a coconut on the road. The bike tilted this way and that as his friend negotiated blind corners, hardly slowing down. He had the blind confidence of the young.

It was not the speed that terrified Roddy, or even the thought of being spilled onto the road. It was the lack of control. The fact that his life was, for those few minutes, totally in the hands of someone else. He’d felt like pissing himself when he’d considered that they were not even particularly close friends. What a way to die.

The fear he felt now was more intense, more all encompassing. It made his terror at the youthful lark pale into insignificance. Now, he feared not only for his body — a body already ravaged by war and hunger and thirst — but also his mind. He was being stalked through the dark avenues of his thoughts, and he had yet to see the pursuer. All the while, the island sat smugly around them. How could logic and self-awareness continue to exist untouched in such a place? A place that seemed happy to kill them, and determined to do so.

Not for the first time, Roddy wished that he had more faith in God. He had seen what belief had done to Ernie, but perhaps his faith had been too blind, too passive. It was ironic that a war which had seemed to bring many people closer to their faith, by forcing them into challenges of mind and spirit, had driven him further away. While people dying on beach-heads prayed to God, Roddy could not understand how God could do that to them in the first place. If He did exist then He was cruel indeed.

They buried Butch away from the stream, so that any future floods would not wash away the soil covering him and expose his body to the elements. None of the men spoke because they could all feel danger watching them, sitting up in the high branches or raising beady eyes from the stream. It watched them where they toiled, and laughed, and counted off another victory on skeletal fingers.

* * *

3. NAMING THE NAMELESS

They headed inland. None of them felt like walking, but they were even less inclined to stay near Butch’s grave. The chuckling stream threatened to drive them mad.

They remained within the jungle. It seemed to stretch on forever, as if the grasslands had never existed, and the flora and fauna of the place began to reveal more of itself to them. Much of it was strange. Max seemed to find solace in trying to identify birds and plants, but his comfort was short lived. For every species he knew, there were a dozen he did not. A snake curled its way up a tree trunk, bright yellow, long and very thin. Max went to name it, but then several scrabbling legs came into view around the trunk, propelling the creature’s rear end, and Max turned away. Roddy recalled the story of the Garden of Eden; how the snake had been cast to the ground, legless, to slither forever on its belly, eating dust. This creature did not belong to that family. This thing, in this place, did not subscribe to the ancient commandment.

They saw another snake, with gills flaring along its flanks and green slime decorating its scales. Max stared at it, frowning, trying to dredge an impossible name from his memory. Impossible, because the creature had no name. “Slime snake,” Max said, and named it.

“
You should name it after us, if you must,” Norris commented.

“
Who’ll ever know?” The finality in Max’s voice turned Roddy cold, but the big man would not be drawn. He was too keen to continue with what he called his naming of parts, as if the entire island were one massive machine and the slithering, flying and scampering things were the well-oiled components.

In a place where the trees thinned out, they saw several giant tortoises picking regally at low foliage. They skirted around the clearing, and Roddy checked the shells to see whether there was any recent damage. Norris was all for attacking the creatures, but to Roddy it seemed pointless, and Max said something which persuaded them that they were best left alone. “Why annoy them more?”